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Bartleby
巴托比专栏
Productivity gurus, old and new
过去的和现在的效率导师
Comparing the time management advice of Arnold Bennett and James Clear.
比较阿诺德·本涅特和詹姆斯·克里尔的时间管理建议。
The most-read non-fiction book in America, measured by views on Kindle and listens on Audible, an audio-book service, is "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. Published in 2018, it has now been on the bestseller list for 277 weeks. Mr Clear's book, which pulls off the impressive trick of being both ludicrous and helpful, argues that small changes of routine can compound into big improvements, whether your goal is to be more productive at work, to eat more healthily or to develop new skills.
以Kindle上的浏览量和有声读物服务Audible上的收听量衡量，美国阅读量最高的非小说类书籍是詹姆斯·克里尔的《原子习惯》。这本书出版于2018年，现已登上畅销书排行榜277周。克里尔的书令人惊叹地成功做到了既荒唐又有用，他认为，无论你的目标是提高工作效率、饮食更健康，还是发展新技能，日常惯例的小变化都可以复合成巨大的进步。
A manual on time management and self-improvement might sound modern. But these were also the themes of a bestseller from the early years of the 20th century. "How to Live on 24 Hours a Day", first published in 1908, is a short self-help book written by Arnold Bennett, a prolific English writer.
关于时间管理和自我完善的指导书可能听起来很有现代感。但这些也是20世纪初的一本畅销书的主题。《悠游度过一天的24小时》是英国多产作家阿诺德·本涅特于1908年首次出版的一本篇幅较短的自助书。
Bennet's book was meant to salve the "feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have 'more time'". He wrote, in other words, for the same aspirational market as Mr Clear does today. (Another of today's productivity Yodas, Cal Newport, cites Bennett in "Deep Work", a book on how to focus.)
本涅特的这本书意在减轻一种内疚感，即“感觉你每天都没有做完一些你想做的事，而且你总是希望等你‘有更多时间了‘再去做”。换句话说，本涅特的写作对象与克里尔如今面向的渴望成功的市场是一样的。(现在的另一位效率导师卡尔·纽波特在关于如何集中注意力的书《深度工作》中引用了本涅特的话。）
Comparing Bennett's book with Mr Clear's yields instructive likenesses and dissimilarities. One obvious difference is tone. Bennett is wry about human foibles. If you think that "ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper" will be enough to solve your problems, he writes, then "lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence." He warns against fetishising a programme of selif-improvement, lest "one may come to exist as in a prison and one's life may cease to be one's own."
将本涅特的书与克里尔的书进行比较，会得出具有启发性的相似之处和不同之处。一个明显的区别是语气。本涅特对人类的小缺点进行幽默嘲讽。他写道，如果你认为“巧妙地在纸上用笔规划出一个时间表”就足以解决你的问题，那么“你不如再躺下，继续不安稳地打瞌睡吧，这就是你的人生。”他警告人们不要迷恋自我完善的计划，以免“一个人可能会像坐牢一样生活，他的人生将不再是他自己的”。
Mr Clear is more earnest. He clothes his advice in capital letters: the Plateau of Latent Potential, the Four Laws of Behaviour Change. He thinks in terms of winners and losers. He says truly bizarre things like:"If you can get 1% better each day for one year you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day for one year you'll decline nearly down to zero." This is known as the Misuse of Mathematics.
克里尔的语气更严肃认真。他用大写字母表达他的建议：潜在潜力的高原、行为变化的四大定律。他从赢家和输家的角度来思考。他说了一些非常奇怪的事情，比如：“如果你能在一年内每天提高1%，那么练习完成时，你的成绩就会变成原来的37倍。相反，如果你在一年内每天退步1%，那么你的成绩就会下降到接近零。”这就叫做数学误用。
The two are separated by social and technological gulfs, too. Bennet's world is one in which women stay at home, tea is made by servants and people entertain themselves by playing cards and "pottering". He tells readers who enjoy nature to go to the nearest gas lamp with a butterfly net. In Mr Clear's world, people spend hours working on their biceps at the gym, make time to be grateful and stop themselves from watching too much TV by taking batteries out of the remote.
这两者也被社会和技术鸿沟区分开。在本涅特的世界里，女人待在家里，茶水由佣人泡好，人们通过打牌和“闲逛”来娱乐自己。他让享受大自然的读者拿着捕蝴蝶的网，去最近的煤油灯前面。在克里尔的世界里，人们会花几个小时在健身房锻炼二头肌，腾出时间来感恩，并取出遥控器的电池，来阻止自己看太多电视。
Perhaps the biggest point of difference concerns work itself. Bennetts audience was the new army of white-collar types taking the train in and out of work each day. He presupposed that the time they spent in the office was unfulfiling. A majority puts "as little of themselves as they conscientiously can into the earning of a livelihood", he wrote. Work was an eight-hour sentence bordered at each end by a commute. As a result, Bennett's tips focus exclusively on the other 16 hours of the day. These were the times when people could carve out the space to develop an expertise in anything from music to architecture.
也许最大的不同之处在于工作本身。本涅特的读者是每天乘坐火车上下班的新白领大军。他预先假定他们在办公室度过的时间是不令人满足的。他写道，大多数人“在勤勉的前提下尽可能少地投入到谋生的工作中”。工作是一段8小时的刑期，以通勤开始和结束。因此，本涅特的建议只关注一天中的其他16个小时。在这个时间段，人们可以留出时间，发展在音乐和建筑等方面的专业知识。
Mr Clear makes the modern assumption that work is as likely to provide purpose and identity as other parts of your life. And it leaves no obvious ocean of time to fill-his tips are about optimising already-busy days by weaving new routines into them. He is a proponent of "stacking habits" so that one ritual follows another: after a morning cup of coffee, for example, meditate for a minute.
而克里尔提出的现代假设是，工作和你生活的其他部分一样都可以提供意义感和身份认同感。这个假设没有留出可以用活动填满的明显的大块时间，他的建议是通过在已经很忙的日子里加入新的日常活动，从而优化这些日子。他支持“堆积习惯”，即一个仪式接着另一个仪式：例如，在早晨喝完咖啡之后，冥想一分钟。
Bennett thinks in terms of hours, Mr Clear in terms of seconds. If the differences between the two mavens are great, the similarities are striking. Both authors espouse the importance of discipline, ritual and habit in managing time more productively. Both stress the need to start small when developing new routines; Mr Clear gets out his capitals again and calls this the Two-Minute Rule.
本涅特以小时为单位思考，而克里尔则以秒为单位思考。如果说这两位大师之间的差异很大，那么他们的相似之处也是惊人的。在更高效地管理时间方面，两位作者都赞同自律、仪式和习惯的重要性。两人都强调，在制定新的日常惯例时，需要从小处着手，克里尔再次拿出了他的大写字母，将其称为两分钟规则。
Above all, it is plain that humans are largely and exasperatingly unchanged. At one point Bennett writes about the difficulty of sustaining concentration in a way that is shamefully recognisable to modern readers: "You will have not gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking around the corner with another subject." Unless humanity itself gets an upgrade, the market for a 22nd-century version of Bennett and Mr Clear is assured.
最重要的是，很明显，人类在很大程度上很令人恼火地没有任何改变。本涅特曾写过保持注意力的困难，现代读者能羞愧地认出这种困难：“你还走不到十码，你的大脑就已经在你的眼皮底下开小差，去角落里玩弄另一个东西了。”除非人类本身得到升级，否则22世纪版本的本涅特和克里尔的读者市场都是有保证的。
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