Quotes About Organization

It's divided into five columns: plan, ready, blocked, work, and done.

the end of each of these brainstorming sessions I require myself to formally record the results, by hand, on a dated page.

To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don't waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.

consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They're easier.

If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time … there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.

America's most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics. We suffer not from a failure of political organization or power, but a failure of love.

The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization.

I can spend hours in a grocery store. I get so excited when I see food, I go crazy. I spend hours arranging my baskets so that everything fits in and nothing gets squashed. I'm really anal about it, actually.

Ah, the Dewey decimal system…humankind's single greatest achievement." From Candace Fleming's The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School

When common sense sees a puzzling phenomenon it looks for a causal agent. When it sees organization it looks for an organizer. This works amazingly well for purposes ranging from the diagnosis of diseases to the creation of governments. But it cannot account for emergence ... the appearance of complex phenomena not predictable from the basic elements and processes alone.

We have found that the values of the constants of nature have not been fine-tuned for life by accident, but that these values are constrained by and logically follow from the fundamental space-time organization of the Cosmic Tree of Life.

All her life she had been such a planner, a plotter, a plodder. She planned meals the week before so she knew how to shop. She planned vacations a year in advance so they could save on airfare.

A process is a construct for organizing value-adding work to achieve a business-value milestone.

a construct for organizing value-adding work to achieve a business-value milestone in a way that meets three specific criteria: 1. Effective and efficient performance 2. Effective management 3. Competitive advantage

Most people in a company, frankly, are not going to understand how communities are built and operate, but many people in the community aren't going to understand the dynamics of how that company operates.

but unless I wanted my mom's neighbor's second cousin's milkman attending my special day, it looked like an afternoon with The List was in order.

William untucked the covers and stood, making a mental list of everything he'd need for the coming trip. A few blades, serrated and non serrated. A vial of acid. A bone saw. A spiked paddle. A cat-o'-nine-tails. And a bag of Gummy Bears.

technical debt' that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn't pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.

Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.

You've just described 'technical debt' that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn't pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.

every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures.

It's difficult to overstate the enormity of this problem—it affects every organization, independent of the industry we operate in, the size of our organization, whether we are profit or non-profit. Now more than ever, how technology work is managed and performed predicts whether our organizations will win in the marketplace, or even survive.

Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent! Can't we do anything without him? Look at us! We're trying to have a management discussion about commitments and resources, and all we do is talk about one guy! I don't care how talented he is. If you're telling me that our organization can't do anything without him, we've got a big problem." Wes

It stands to reason that if it is organized so that it can win, the business wins, too.