pre-digital office productivity tips
January 6, 2020 3:18 AM   Subscribe

As I'm working myself through the Power Broker, I noticed some interesting tricks Robert Moses was using to manage his office work, communications. Where can I learn more about office productivity before computers?

I'm halfway through the book and so far noticed two interesting strategies he used that are deeper than "work all the time, and have your secretary in your chauffeured car take dictation":
- he had a very simple table in his office, without drawers, so he was forced to process every paper in the morning as he had no place to stash them away
- he organized his many incoming phone lines into a simple queue and had his secretary block every incoming call if he was taking an other one. All others had to wait, or leave a message - except for Al Smith. This minimized distractions, and let him manage communications on his own terms, at his own tempo.

My question is: is there any book, article, website, where one can learn more about the tricks people used in the office before computers? Although emails are arriving faster, reading and writing messages is still limited by the people working with them, so learning from the past could still be applicable today.

What are your favourite, low tech, organizational tricks? How did people managed office work, indexed paperwork, managed projects before computers? Seeing how fast Moses was able to Get Things Done, one wonders how much plus efficiency we got from computers, and if we lost some knowledge in some other area.
posted by kmt to Work & Money (9 answers total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
The first edition of Getting Things Done was 2001, which was obviously after computers became common in offices. However, it may still be of interest to you because it was pre-smartphone, which I think changed people's relationship to both work and organization.

(Tangentially: I can't remember what podcast it was, though I'm sure there were several, I heard a bit on the history of FedEx which may also be of interest to you, as people no longer needing to overnight documents drastically altered their business. My dad is a workaholic lawyer and vacations when I was little used to feature a lot of FedExing papers back and forth and my dad dictating edits over the phone. That stopped when they started using email. There was even a brief period where my technophobe dad didn't work on vacation because he didn't have a laptop.)
posted by hoyland at 4:22 AM on January 6, 2020 [3 favorites]


I’ve been working in offices off and on since 1975, so way before computers. I think the biggest productivity “hack” from the old days was simply that there was no wasting time on the internet. So when you were at work, aside from occasional conversations, you pretty much spent all your time working. If you were wasting time talking to your coworkers, it would be very obvious and you’d likely get talked to. I did have an early data entry job with McDonnel Douglas, around 1977, where the computer tracked how much time you were actually spending doing data entry. If you ever fell below a specific amount, you would be fired on the spot no matter what the reason might be. So we were very productive in that job. Apologies if you’re more wanting executive-level type stuff.
posted by FencingGal at 5:50 AM on January 6, 2020 [6 favorites]


Seeing how fast Moses was able to Get Things Done, one wonders how much plus efficiency we got from computers, and if we lost some knowledge in some other area.

Having observed the change over (computers were well around when I started full time work in 1995, but I worked in an organization that was slow about it), I think one nuance is that there were extra people working, like managers had secretaries/assistants where now they might not at that level. That allowed them to prioritize differently.

That change also came along with the "lean organization" which has left people triaging a lot of work in a way we didn't back then...I suppose that could be seen as inefficient, but in my early days of work a lot of us went home feeling we'd finished our work and now that seems like an impossible dream. But it also meant that we had time to actually prioritize and think through work.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:18 AM on January 6, 2020 [8 favorites]


The more information that's available and accessible--or even that might be--the more analysis that goes into every decision, the greater the sensitivity to risk (financial, PR, legal, whatever) and hence the slower the decision making process. Back in the day, it just wasn't possible to discover, collect and crunch the vast amount of quantitative and qualitative data available now. Without computers and algorithms, humans made many more decisions.

So I tend to think that one key skill from before the information avalanche engulfed every desk is simply decisiveness. As people moved up the hierarchy, they got to make increasingly critical decisions, so they had practice and honed their skills. Consequently, we also had both the spectacular successes and failures associated with people following their intuition or even just asserting their will through force of personality. Today, risk awareness and the availability (or lack thereof) of pertinent data inhibits many people from taking the plunge, whether as individuals or on an organization's behalf. We've lost the knack for making decisions in low-information scenarios.
posted by carmicha at 6:43 AM on January 6, 2020 [4 favorites]


Best answer: If you can find an earlier edition of The Organized Executive, there's a bunch of systems, techniques, etc., for running a pre-digital office. (I have a copy from 1985, but no knowledge of the linked edition.)
posted by Bron at 7:59 AM on January 6, 2020 [3 favorites]


Peter Drucker's writings might be of interest as he wrote for decades about work and management spanning pre-and post-digital years (like the 40's to the 2000's). He focused on attention management as a tool before it was popular.

Here's one brief article that introduces his work.
posted by lafemma at 8:32 AM on January 6, 2020 [1 favorite]


My first job in an organized office was in 1978. That was just about the beginning of it being permissible to eat at your desk.

There was the secretary. Her job included many little hacks. The biggest and best was keeping the chron file which was the chronological file of copies of all correspondence sent by her boss or her department. She also had at her desk one or more telephone books, a dictionary, and the OAG (Airline Flight Guide - schedules of all airline flights in the US). The job was so standardized that a temp subbing for a secretary was maybe 80% efficient with a minimum of coaching.

Any large office had a mail room. Aside from actual mail, the mail included memos, etc. sent from one department to another which would be sent in multiple use envelopes.

Anecdote: One the morning I had to report for the draft, we passed Malcolm Forbes (of Forbes Magazine) as he was being driven to work in his huge Rolls-Royce. He was reading the newspaper which would would have been a work necessity for him. My father noted that he had about an hour's drive to the office, and that the car and chauffeur added a usable hour to his work day.
posted by SemiSalt at 10:22 AM on January 6, 2020 [4 favorites]


Best answer: I picked up a book at a used book sale called "The Complete Secretary's Handbook", published 1951, and it's full of stuff like this. How to set up a filing system, manage a calendar, etc. Also includes instructions on creating charts with a typewriter and by hand.

A cursory search shows lots of versions of books like this, for dates from the late 40s (at least) through the 70s (at least). Would be interesting to compare an early version to a late one to see what changed, as well.
posted by brentajones at 11:50 AM on January 6, 2020 [6 favorites]


Gantt charts for project management have been around for 100 years. They have gone digital now of course.

Tickler files were also a useful tool (I know someone still using a version of this).
posted by gudrun at 7:44 PM on January 6, 2020 [1 favorite]


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