A taste:

He had to think, and the best way to think was to go through the motions of working. This morning's batch of papers was waiting in his IN basket, on top of last Friday's, and so his first action was to turn the whole stack upside down on his desk and start from the bottom. As he did each day (or rather on the days when he bothered with his IN basked, for there were many days when he left it alone) he tried first to see how many papers he could get rid of without actually reading their contents. Some could be thrown away, others could be almost as rapidly disposed of by scrawling, "What about this?" in their margins, with his initials, and sending them to Bandy, or by writing "Know anything on this?" and sending them to someone like Ed Small, next door; but the danger here was that the same papers might come back in a few days marked "Do" from Bandy and "No" from Small. A safer course was to mark a thing "File" for Mrs. Jorgensen and the girls, after the briefest possible glance had established that it wasn't of urgent importance; if it was, he might mark it "File & Follow 1 Wk.," or he might put it aside and go on to the next one. The gradual accumulation of papers put aside in this way was what he turned to as soon as he was finished with, or tired of, the IN basket. [...] May of the papers in [the resulting pile of "important" work] bore the insignia of Bandy's "Do" or Ed Small's "No," and some had been through the "File & Follow" cycle as many as three or four times; some, bearing notes like "Frank—might look into this," were the gifts of men who used him as he used Small

— from Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates, any errors probably mine from transcription.