process demand exact analysis if the greatest efficiency is to be
reached. Everybody knows what an amount of attention the golf player
has to give to every detail of his movement, and yet it would be
easier to discover by haphazard methods the best way to handle the
golf stick than to use the spade to the best effect.
On the other hand, the better method is not at all necessarily the
more difficult one. More effort is needed at the beginning to acquire
an exactly adjusted scheme of movement, but as soon as the
well-organized activity has become habitual, it will realize itself
with less inner interference. For the educated it is no harder to
speak correct grammar than to speak slang, and it is no more difficult
to write orthographically than to indulge in chaotic spelling, just as
in every field it is no harder to show good manners than to behave
rudely. If the sciences of digging and chopping, of reaping and
raking, of weeding and mowing, of spraying and feeding, are all
postulates of the future, each can transform the chance methods into
exact ones, and that means into truly efficient ones, only when every
element has been brought under the scrutiny of the psychological
laboratory. We must measure the time in hundredths of a second, must
study the psychophysical conditions of every movement, where not trees
are cut or hay raked, but where the tools move systems of levers which
record graphically the exact amount and character of every partial
effect. The one problem of the distribution of work and rest alone is
of such tremendous importance for the agricultural work that a real
scientific study of the details might lead to just as much saving as
the introduction of new machinery. The farmhand, who would never think
of wasting his money, wastes his energies by contracting big muscles,
where a better economized system of movement would allow him to reach
the same result through the contraction of smaller muscles, which
involves much less energy and much less fatigue. The loss by wrong
bending and wrong coördination of movement may be greater than by bad
weather.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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