The 38 Ways to Happiness :- Not Leaving one's Work Undone (3)

Blessing Fourteen:
Not Leaving one’s Work Undone

 

 

C. UNFINISHED WORK
C.1 Why work left unfinished
Some people in an office get a reputation for leaving a backlogue of work. Every piece of work which involves them in any way can be easily found because it is always on that person’s desk unfinished. They have two baskets on their desk, an ‘in’ basket and an ‘out’ basket. The ‘in’ basket is always stacked up higher than their head, but there is never anything in the ‘out’ tray. Thus if you have lost a particular document people in the office say playfully “If you want to find finished work go to Mr. A but if you want find unfinished work go to Mr. B because it is all on his desk!” The same is true for students always leaving the revision until the exams are close. If you want to look at why work is left unfinished, in almost every case you can generalize down to four basic reasons:

 

1. wrong timing: Doing the work at the wrong time or with the wrong timing. If you do the work at the wrong time such as ploughing a field out of season, weeds will choke the bare soil before you manage to sow your crops (hasty in things that don’t require it) or else wait until it’s too late before you start doing something (slow in things that should have been finished long ago) e.g. someone who doesn’t study when he has the opportunity as a child and has to do his studies when he too old to remember anything. (‘Make hay while the sun shines’ but ‘More haste less speed’). Same for people who wait until they are old before becoming interested in training the mind. Work which needs to be done patiently (e.g. throwing a pot of clay) or driving at the same speed as the rest of the traffic. Meditation needs you to be patient, like waiting for crops to grow or like a hen hatching an egg where the mother hen must wait thirty days whether the mother hen must wait thirty days regardless. If things have a fixed period or cycle there is not point rushing them. Also if you rush into something and do it wrongly as the result you will waste both time, money and morale because instead of doing it only once (correctly) you have to do it three times (do it wrongly, undo it and re-do it) and on every time there is no satisfaction from your achievement. Better to do things cautiously so you can get it right from the start. With meditation also you cannot rush to bring the mind to a standstill. You cannot achieve overnight success in meditation (except for 0.00001% of people in very exceptional circumstances).You have to be able to tell whether what you are doing is the sort of work where the time spent is fixed or whether it is something that can be hurried. If it is to take a fixed length of time, then you have to put up with waiting. However, if it is something that can be done more quickly then it can be hurried so that you have more time to speak to others.

2. wrong technique: An example of doing things by the wrong technique is trying to work individually when the task requires teamwork or dividing up your time wrongly spending too long doing any one question in an examination paper — the result is that you run out of motivation to do the work at all.

3. never getting started: There are many reasons why people prevaricate instead of starting to do things. One reason is those wait for the auspicious time by studying horoscopes. Meditators however, are those who take their destiny in their own hands and don’t wait for astrologers to organize their lives for them. Any time when you get round to doing good deeds, then the simple act of getting down to doing it will be auspicious itself. If you want to know whether it is the auspicious time to do something or not, don’t waste money to see a fortune teller but instead use your powers of observation and experience to see whether you are ready and prepared to do the task in hand. If by common sense you have discerned that you are ready to do something, there is a good chance that getting started will yield success.

4. not genuine in one’s efforts: Not being genuine in one’s efforts means getting one’s priorities wrong. Instead of realizing how important your work is, you neglect it in favour of something more trivial. Common distractions that get in the way of our work are as follows:
• eating. The way to cure such a habit is to go on a meditation retreat where you must eat food all mixed up together or eat only one meal a day.
• sleeping. To train yourself to sleep no more than you need to you have to train yourself from an early age.
• alcohol: because they are more interested in consuming alcohol or other intoxicants that dull the mind. To overcome such a tendency you need to abstain from consuming these substances.
• courting lovers: Some do no work because they are more interested in boy/girlfriends and spend all day looking in their diary. . .
• entertainment: some take their leisure time more seriously than their time at work to the neglect of earning their living.
• gambling: because they are more interested in gambling — they have no time for working and burn up all their savings.
• bad friends: modeling oneself on bad friends who neglect their work will make us more lazy
• laziness: when people become lazy they have excuses for everything excuses — where work is concerned if it is not too hot it is too cold, if it is not too early it is too late.
• incompatible working hours: This is not the same as being more interested in sleeping but leads to failure in work because they work at a time which doesn’t fit in with other people.