Eleven Things in March

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a maker who had done well would now and then open his shop for three days and let the trade walk through it, and men came in from forty miles off with a notebook.

Two cabinet makers in one town, the same oak, the same benches, two men apiece.
Both travelled to the same showing in the city that March, and both filled a notebook.
Both came home with eleven things they meant to alter in their own shops.
One of them began four of the eleven in April.
The other began one, and did not take the list out again until June.
Same trade, same eleven ideas. By the next March, why had only one of them altered anything?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two cabinet makers in the town I have never named, with shops off the same street and nothing between them in skill. In the March they shut for three days and went to the city, where a maker who supplied two counties had opened his doors, answering everything he was asked.

There was nothing magical in it. He cut his stock for the whole week on a Monday instead of job by job. He had a jig that held a drawer side while a man marked it, so the thirtieth drawer was marked like the first. He kept a book of customers with the measurements of their rooms. Eleven such things, and both men wrote down all eleven, and agreed on the coach home that he had nothing they had not, except the arrangement.

The first cabinet maker went at it properly, which is to say he began four of them in April. The jig he built most of on a wet Tuesday, the stop on it was wrong, and it went under the bench to wait for the hour that would put it right. The book of customers he kept faithfully for nine days, until the week three jobs came in together. The Monday cutting lasted three Mondays, until a rush job broke it.

By Michaelmas his shop was the shop it had been in February. He was neither idle nor a fool, and two of his four were the very ones his rival picked. The following March he did not go to the showing, saying that sort of thing was for shops with more hands in them.

The second cabinet maker took the jig and nothing else, for a plain reason: he made thirty sets of drawers or more in a year, and a change to a thing you do thirty times tells you quickly whether it is any good. He gave it a date before he began. By the last Saturday in April drawers would be made that way in his shop, or the jig would go on the fire.

He made it badly and altered it twice. For three weeks it was slower than his old marking gauge and he used it regardless, since a method judged in its first week is judged on the learning of it. He told the boy and chalked the one line of it above the glue pot, then put the old gauge in the loft, so the lazy hand reaching at four in the afternoon found nothing to reach for.

Then he watched for one thing only: a fortnight in which nobody had to remember the new way. It came in the second week of May, and he took up the second of the eleven, and in July the third. By the following March four of them were simply how that shop worked, and seven were still in the notebook, costing nothing at all.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A change is not adopted when you agree with it, nor when you begin it, but when the work is done that way by somebody who has forgotten there was ever another way. Everything short of that is a change in the air, and a change in the air must be carried.

Consider what the carrying costs. Your present way of working is free. It takes no decision and survives a hard week, which is all a habit is: a method that has stopped charging you attention. The new way charges at every repetition, and wants its moment of thought precisely when the work is in your hands and Friday is coming. That price is paid out of your busiest hour.

From which the arithmetic follows. Four at once do not cost four times one. They cost more, because each competes for the same scarce hour, and the first disorderly week reverts all four together. Reversion takes no effort and no decision. It is what happens when attention is called away, and attention is always called away. So the limit on what your trade improves in a year is not the supply of good ideas, which is endless, but how many you can carry as far as forgetting.

Which one, then. Choose by repetition rather than by grandeur, since a change touching work you do weekly reports back inside the month, and a small fault repeated twenty times a day is the dearest thing in your shop. An alteration to something you do twice a year teaches you nothing for eighteen months. Give it a date and a verdict before you begin, in the manner of any trial worth running, so it becomes your method or is struck out rather than drifting on half done.

Two cautions. Some changes cannot honestly be taken singly: a book of customers is no use without the habit of writing in it, nor the habit without a time of day for the writing. The test of whether two alterations are really one is whether half of it does you any good alone. The second caution is that one at a time is not one a year. The rule governs how many are in the air, not how fast you go, and the week a change becomes invisible is the week to begin the next.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. How many changes am I carrying? Count the ones begun and not finished: the half-built jig, the book kept for nine days, the new way you still remind yourself about. Four at once means four reversions waiting for a busy week.
2. Which of them touches work I do every week? Land that one and let the others wait. Frequency is what turns a method into a habit, and a habit is the only form in which an improvement stays bought.
3. What is the date, and what will I look at when it comes? The sign is usually this: has a fortnight passed in which nobody had to be reminded? If not, you are still carrying it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same eleven ideas, one beginning four of them and the other one. By the next March, why had only one of them altered anything?

Because only one had reckoned on the cost of carrying. The four were good ideas, and he was the better judge of ideas that day. But each wanted his attention in the same crowded hour, and the first bad week put all four back where they were. The other paid the whole price of one until it cost nothing, and only then spent again.

The verse:

Eleven in the notebook and a drawer to keep them in,
And the drawer is no disgrace while one of them is running.
A change is not the thing you thought, it is the thing you do unthinking,
So carry one until the day you have forgotten you began.

Until next time. Go and list every change you have begun and not finished, choose the one touching work you do weekly, and put a date against it today.

P.S. If you have anybody working with you, they measure this better than your memory does. A change your apprentice makes unprompted is adopted. One you must mention on a Monday is still in the air, however long ago you began it.

Also in the archive: The Copper He Spoiled on Purpose, Settled in February and Twelve Men and Two.