There is a never-ending supply of business leaders telling us how we can, and must, do more. John Bernard offers breathless advi

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问题     There is a never-ending supply of business leaders telling us how we can, and must, do more. John Bernard offers breathless advice on conducting " Business at the Speed of Now". Michael Port tells salesmen how to "Book Yourself Solid". And in case you thought you might be able to grab a few moments to yourself, Keith Ferrazzi warns that you must "Never Eat Alone".
    【F1】Yet when it comes to the biggest problem in the business world, the key is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busyness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.
    【F2】Which of these thorns of modern business life is worse remains open to debate, but what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster.
    All this "doing more" is making it harder to focus on real work.【F3】In 2012 Gloria Mark of the University of California deprived 13 people in the IT business of e-mail for five days and studied them intensively to find that people without it concentrated on tasks for longer and experienced less stress.
    It is high time that we tried a different strategy—"doing less and thinking more". The most obvious beneficiaries of thinking more would be creative workers—the very people who are supposed to be at the heart of the modern economy. In the early 1990s Mihaly Csikszentmi-halyi, a psychologist, asked 275 creative types if he could interview them for a book he was writing. A third did not bother to reply at all and another third refused to take part.【F4】Creative people’s most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time— and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings.
    Managers themselves could benefit.【F5】Those at the top are best employed thinking about strategy rather than operations—about whether the company is doing the right thing rather than whether it is sticking to its plans. Bill Gates, when he was in charge of Microsoft, used to take two "think weeks" a year when he would lock himself in an isolated cottage.
    Doing more has been producing negative returns for some time now. It is time to try the far more radical strategy of doing less and thinking more.
【F1】

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答案然而当谈到商界中最大的问题时,关键不在于太少,而在于太多——太多的分心和干扰,太多拘泥于形式的事情,总而言之就是太忙碌。

解析 该句是一个复合句,句子的前半部分是一个以when引导的时间状语从句,后面是主句the key is…,翻译的难点在于对句子表语中三个并列成分的把握。在表语的第二个并列成分中,done for the sake of form为过去分词短语作too many things的后置定语,可根据中文的习惯将其前置,译成“太多拘泥于形式的事情”。此句中的系动词is可根据上下文译成“在于”。
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