View source for How to Handle Work (HCOB 590819)

Do it Now.

One of the best ways to cut your work in half is not to do it twice.

Probably your most fruitful source of Dev-T is your own double work.

This is the way you do double work.

You pick up a despatch or a piece of work, look it over and then put it aside to do later, then later you pick it up and read it again and only then do you do it.

This of course doubles your traffic just like that.

One of the reasons I can handle so much traffic is that I don't do it twice. I make it a heavy rule that if I find myself handling a piece of traffic, I handle it, not put it into a hold or a later category.

If I happen to be prowling through my basket in the Message Center Stack to see what's there, I do what I find there.

If I am given a message or a datum that requires further action from me, I do it right when I receive it.

This is how I buy „loafing time“.

Now I'm not trying to hold me up as a model of virtue as the man who always does his job; I do many jobs and many hats; I am holding myself up as an ambitious loafer and as a buyer of valuable loafing time.

There's no need to look busy if you are not busy.

There is no need to fondle and caress work because there isn't enough of it.

There's plenty of work to do. The best answer to work of any kind is to do it.

If you do every piece of work that comes your way WHEN it comes your way and not after a while, if you always take the initiative and take action, not refer it, you never get any traffic back unless you've got a psycho on the other end.

In short, the way to get rid of traffic is to do it, not to refer it; anything referred has to be read by you again, digested again, and handled again, so never refer traffic, just do it so it's done.

You can keep a comm line in endless foment by pretending that the easiest way not to work is to not handle things or to refer things. Everything you don't handle comes back and bites. Everything you refer has to be done when it comes back to you.

So if you are truly a lover of ease, the sort of person who yawns comfortably and wears holes in heels resting them on desks, if your true ambition is one long bout of spring fever, then you'll do as I suggest and handle everything that comes your way when it comes and not later, and you'll never refer anything to anybody that you yourself can do promptly.

That people begin to point you out as a model of efficiency, as the thing expected to cop the next world's speed record, that articles begin to appear about the marvels you are creating, is all incidental. You and I know we did it so we could be lazy and not have to work.

For it can be truly said that the way to all labor of a long and continuous grind is by putting off the action when the message is received and in referring it all to somebody else, that's the way to slavery, to tired muscles and tattered brains; that's the route to baskets piled high.

So come loaf with me.

Do it when you see it and do it yourself.

== Document information ==
'''Document type:''' Hubbard Communication Office Bulletin

'''Date:''' 19 August 1959

'''Author:''' L. Ron Hubbard

'''Place:''' Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex

'''Distribution:''' CenOCon, SHSBC Students, Franchise, Field

'''Comments:''' Re-issued as HCO Policy Letter of 29 May 1963

[[Category:HCOB 1959]]
[[Category:Efficiency Course]]