Your ShelfYour Projects

Wastefully Active

50%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 24, 1912

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 89, No. 43.

Read the full edition

Wastefully Active

PROBABLY most of us waste more time in our activities than in our idleness. It is not the doing of nothing, but the doing of what we need not do, that is the great destroyer of our highest efficiency. We go through six or eight motions to accomplish what could have been done as well with five. We take several hundred words to say what could have been put into fifty. So our time slips away unnoticed, in trickling, wasted minutes, and at the end of a day in which we have been “on the jump” all day long, we wonder why more has not been accomplished. Not idleness but unnecessary activity has been our foe. The person of extraordinary accomplishment may not seem to work nearly so hard as we, nor to be nearly so busy; yet he gets a great deal more done. He simply cuts out the unnecessary words, actions, even thoughts. He not only accomplishes a great deal more, but he has more leisure and margin in his life. “Doing more by doing less” is a secret of efficiency. —Selected.