Back in the days when correspondence came in envelopes delivered by the post office, I wasn\u2019t much good at keeping up.\u00a0 There was a certain regular rhythm to things.\u00a0 Mail came in, and I started opening it.\u00a0 For some reason or other, I sat down and dealt with certain items promptly.\u00a0 Other things, like bills, were put in a pile that I absolutely had to deal with once a month, and I eventually developed the habit of paying them on time, since the consequences of not doing so were so dire.\u00a0 Other stuff, some opened, some unopened, piled up towards the back of the desk, to be dealt with \u201clater\u201d.\u00a0 Eventually letters would begin to fall off the back of the desk to the floor, where they went unnoticed for long periods of time, perhaps forever.\u00a0 In this way the pile stayed manageable, a repository for finding tasks to do as a way of not doing other more urgent things that came along.<\/p>\n
Occasionally this system led to unfortunate results.\u00a0 Some letters that fell off the back of the desk, or remained in the pile but were never opened, turned out to be important.\u00a0 But not that often.\u00a0 If answering a letter was truly important, I would usually get a phone call or a follow up letter, and then I would search for the original and deal with it.\u00a0 Even I am not stupid enough to overlook letters from, say, the Internal Revenue Service, that are marked \u201curgent\u201d.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the system worked quite well.\u00a0 For a while, when I was a young assistant professor at UCLA, I was in charge of admissions to the M.A. program.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a very big program, and I tended to let things pile up until the chair of the department reminded me that I it was time to bring a list of the best candidates to the next meeting .\u00a0 A number of years later, I was trying to raise some money for a research institute at Stanford, and I had lunch with an executive of a company that made high quality modems.\u00a0 This was in the day when all people who wanted to use a computer from home dialed into a mainframe, and a 1200 baud modem was \u201cstate of the art,\u201d an expensive bit of equipment that everyone wanted.\u00a0 His company made the best ones.\u00a0 He was very successful.<\/p>\n