+A place for everything, and everything in its place.+--Things that
belong together should be kept together. Dishes belong in the cupboard;
clothes in the closet; boxes on the shelves; loose papers in the waste
basket; tools in the tool-chest; wood in the wood-shed. And it is our
duty to keep them in their proper place, when not in actual use. In
business it is of the utmost importance to have a precise place for
everything connected with it. The carpenter or machinist must have a
place for each tool, and always put it there when he is through using
it. The merchant must have a definite book and page or drawer or
pigeon-hole for every item which he records. The scholar must have a set
of cards or envelopes or drawers or pockets alphabetically arranged in
which he keeps each class of facts where he can turn to it instantly.
This keeping things of a kind together, each kind in a place by itself,
is system. Without system nothing can be managed well, and no great
enterprise can be carried on at all.
THE VIRTUE.
+Orderliness is manly and virtuous because it keeps things under our own
control, and makes them the expression of our will.+--The orderly and
systematic man can manage a thousand details with more ease and power
than a man without order and system can manage a dozen. It is not power
to do more work than other men, but power to do the same amount of work
in such an orderly and systematic way that it accomplishes a hundred
times as much as other men's work, which marks the difference between
the statesman who manages the affairs of a nation or the merchant prince
who handles millions of dollars, and the man of merely ordinary
administrative and business ability.
THE REWARD.
+The orderly man has his resources at his disposal at a moment's
notice.+--He can go directly to the thing he wants and be sure of
finding it in its place. When a business is thoroughly systematized it
is as easy to find one thing out of ten thousand as it is to find one
thing out of ten. Hence there is scarcely any limit to the expansion of
business of which the systematic man is capable. A business thus reduced
to system will almost run itself. Thus the heads of great concerns are
able to accept public office, or to spend a year in Europe, in absolute
confidence that the business will be well conducted in their absence,
and that they can take it up when they return just as they left it. For
they know that each man has his part of the work for which he is
responsible; each process has its precise method by which it is to be
performed; each account has its exact place where it is to be kept.
Order and system are the keys to business success. Orderliness keeps
things under our control, and the convenience and efficiency with which
things serve us is the direct and necessary consequence of having them
under control.
THE TEMPTATION.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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