"How to Get Things Done"
Robert Benchley

From _Chips off the Old Benchley_, (c) 1949 ASIN B005110QBG

A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to 
get so
much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. Hundreds of 
thousands
of people throughout the country are wondering how I have time to do 
all my
painting, engineering, writing and philanthropic work when, according 
to the
rotogravure sections and society notes, I spend all my time riding to
hounds, going to fancy-dress balls disguised as Louis XIV, or 
spelling out
GREETINGS TO CALIFORNIA in formation with three thousand Los Angeles 
school
children. "All work and all play," they say.

The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work 
done is a
simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known 
psychological
principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I 
shall
have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon.

The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work,
provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us say that I have five
things which have to be done before the end of the week: (1) a 
basketful of
letters to be answered, some of them dating from October, 1928 (2) 
some
bookshelves to be put up and arranged with books (3) a hair-cut to 
get (4) a
pile of scientific magazines to go through and clip (I am collecting 
all
references to tropical fish that I can find, with the idea of someday 
buying
myself one) and (5) an article to write for this paper.

Now. With these five tasks staring me in the face on Monday morning, 
it is
little wonder that I go right back to bed as soon as I have had 
breakfast,
in order to store up health and strength for the almost superhuman
expenditure of energy that is to come. Mens sana in corpore sano is my
motto.

As I lie in bed on Monday morning storing up strength, I make out a
schedule. "What do I have to do first?" I ask myself. Well, those 
letters
really should be answered and the pile of scientific magazines should 
be
clipped. And here is where my secret process comes in. Instead of 
putting
them first on the list, I put them last. I say: "First you must write 
that
article for the newspaper." I sometimes go so far in this 
self-deception as
to make out a list in pencil, with "No. 1. Newspaper article" 
underlined in
red. (The underlining in red is rather difficult, as there is never a 
red
pencil on the table beside the bed, unless I have taken one to bed 
with me
on Sunday night.)

I then seat myself at my desk with my typewriter before me and 
sharpen five
pencils. (The sharp pencils are for poking holes in the desk-blotter, 
and a
pencil has to be pretty sharp to do that. I find that I can't get 
more than
six holes out of one pencil.) Following this I say to myself "Now, 
old man!
Get at this article!"

Gradually the scheme begins to work. My eye catches the pile of 
magazines,
which I have artfully placed on a near-by table beforehand. I write 
my name
and address at the top of the sheet of paper in the typewriter and 
then sink
back. The magazines being within reach, I look to see if anyone is 
watching
me and get one off the top of the pile. Hello, what's this! In the 
very
first one is an article by Dr. William Beebe, illustrated by 
horrifying
photographs! Pushing my chair away from my desk, I am soon hard at 
work
clipping.

One of the interesting things about the Argyopelius, or "Silver 
Hatchet"
fish, I find, is that it has eyes in its wrists. I would have been
sufficiently surprised just to find out that a fish had wrists, but 
to learn
that it has eyes in them is a discovery so astounding that I am 
hardly able
to cut out the picture.

Thus, before the afternoon is half over, I have gone through the 
scientific
magazines and have a neat pile of clippings (including one of a Viper 
Fish
which I wish you could see. You would die laughing). Then it is back 
to the
grind of the newspaper article.

This time I get as far as the title, which I write down with 
considerable
satisfaction until I find that I have misspelled one word terribly, 
so that
the whole sheet of paper has to come out and a fresh one be inserted. 
As I
am doing this, my eye catches the basket of letters.

Now, if there is one thing that I hate to do (and there is, you may 
be sure)
it is to write letters. But somehow, with the magazine article before 
me
waiting to be done, I am seized with an epistolary fervor, and I 
slyly sneak
the first of the unanswered letters out of the basket. I figure out 
in my
mind that I will get more into the swing of writing the article if I
practice on a few letters.

This first one, anyway, I really must answer. True, it is from a 
friend in
Antwerp asking me to look him up when I am in Europe in the summer of 
1929,
so he can't actually be watching the incoming boats for an answer, 
but I owe
something to politeness after all. So instead of putting a fresh 
sheet of
copy-paper into the typewriter, I slip in one of my handsome bits of
personal stationery and dash off a note to my friend in Antwerp. 
Then, being
well in the letter-writing mood, I clean up the entire batch.

I feel a little guilty about the article, but the pile of freshly 
stamped
envelopes and the bundle of clippings on tropical fish do much to 
salve my
conscience. Tomorrow I will do the article, and no fooling this time.

When tomorrow comes I am up with one of the older and more sluggish 
larks. A
fresh sheet of copy-paper in the machine, and my name and address 
neatly
printed at the top, and all before eleven A.M.! "A human dynamo" is 
the name
I think up for myself. I have decided to write something about
snake-charming and am already more than satisfied with the title 
"These
Snake-Charming People." But, in order to write about snake-charming, 
one has
to know a little about its history, and where should one go to find 
history
but to a book? Maybe in that pile of books in the corner is one on
snake-charming!

So, with a perfectly clear conscience, I leave my desk for a few 
minutes and
begin glancing over the titles. Of course, it is difficult to find any
book, much less one on snake-charming, in a pile which has been 
standing in
the corner for weeks. What really is needed is for them to be on a 
shelf
where their titles will be visible at a glance. And there is the 
shelf,
standing beside the pile of books! It seems almost like a divine 
command:
"If you want to finish that article, first put up the shelf and 
arrange the
books on it!" Nothing could be clearer or more logical.

In order to put up the shelf, the laws of physics have decreed that 
there
must be nails, a hammer and some sort of brackets. You can't just wet 
a
shelf with your tongue and stick it up. And, as there are no nails or
brackets in the house, the next thing to do is to put on my hat and 
go out
to buy them. Much as it disturbs me to put off the actual start of the
article, I feel that I am doing only what is in the line of duty. As 
I put
on my hat, I realize to my chagrin that I need a hair-cut badly. I 
can kill
two birds with one stone, and stop in at the barber's on the way 
back. I
will feel all the more like writing after a turn in the fresh air. Any
doctor would tell me that.

So in a few hours I return, spic and span and smelling of lilac, 
bearing
nails, brackets, the evening papers and some crackers and peanut
butter. Then it's ho! for a quick snack and a glance through the 
papers
(there might be something in them which would alter what I was going 
to
write about snake-charming) and in no time at all the shelf is up, 
slightly
crooked but up, and the books are arranged in a neat row. There does 
not
happen to be one on snake-charming, but there is a very interesting 
one
containing some Hogarth prints which will bear closer inspection.

And so, you see, in two days I have done four of the things I had to 
do,
simply by making believe that it was the fifth that I must do. And 
the next
day, I fix up something else, like taking down the bookshelf and 
putting it
somewhere else, that I have to do, and then I get the fifth one done.

The only trouble is that, at this rate, I will soon run out of things 
to do,
and will be forced to get at my newspaper articles the first thing 
Monday
morning.