Four Habits of Highly effective people
1. Never walk down the hall without a document in your hands.
People with documents in their hands look like hardworking employees
heading for important meetings. People with nothing in their hands
look like they're heading for the cafeteria. People with the newspaper in
their hands look like they're heading for the bathroom. Above all, make
sure you carry loads of stuff home with you at night, thus generating the
false impression that you work longer hours than you do.
2. Use computers to look busy.
Any time you use a computer, it looks like "work" to the casual
observer. You can send and receive personal email, calculate your
finances and generally have a blast without doing anything remotely related to
work. These aren't exactly the societal benefits that everybody from the
computer revolution expected but they're not bad either. When you get caught
by your boss -and you will get caught - your best defense is to
claim you're teaching yourself to use the new software, thus saving
valuable training dollars. You're not a loafer, you're a self-starter.
Offer to show your boss what you learned. That will make your boss
scurry away like a frightened Salamander.
3. Messy desk.
Top management can get away with a clean desk. For the rest of us,
it looks like you're not working hard enough. Build huge piles of
documents around your workspace. To the observer, last year's work looks
the same as today's work; it's volume that counts. Pile them high and
wide. If you know somebody is coming to your cubicle, bury the document
you'll need halfway down in an existing stack and rummage for it when
he/she arrives.
4. Voice mail.
Never answer your phone if you have voice mail. People don't call
you just because they want to give you something for nothing - they call
because they want YOU to do work for THEM. That's no way to live. Screen
all your calls through voice mail. If somebody leaves a voice mail
message for you and it sounds like impending work, respond during lunch
hour, That way you're hardworking and conscientious even though you're being a
devious weasel. If you diligently employ the method of screening
incoming calls and then returning calls when nobody is there, this will
greatly increase the odds that they will give up or look for a solution that
doesn't involve you. The sweetest voice mail message you can ever hear is
"Ignore my last message. I took care of it". If your voice mailbox has a
limit on the number of messages it can hold, make sure you reach that limit
frequently. One way to do that is to never erase any incoming
messages. If that takes too long, send yourself a few messages. Your
callers will hear a recorded message that says, "Sorry, this mailbox is
full" - a sure sign that you are a hardworking employee in high demand.
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