Quotes About Work

Easy. Easy is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs. "That should be easy for you to do, right?" But notice how rarely people describe their own tasks as easy. For you, it's "Let me look into it"—but for others, it's "Get it done.

Stress is passed from organization to employee, from employee to employee, and then from employee to customer. Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.

What you do is your legacy.

You have to keep asking yourself if the way you're working today is the way you'd want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not "later.

You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it.

The expectation of an immediate response is the ember that ignites so many fires at work.

remote work has opened the door to a new era of freedom and luxury. A brave new world beyond the industrial-age belief in The Office.

Calm is protecting people's time and attention. Calm is about 40 hours of work a week. Calm is reasonable expectations. Calm is ample time off. Calm is smaller. Calm is a visible horizon. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second. Calm is more independence, less interdependence. Calm is sustainable practices for the long term. Calm is profitability.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you had three or even four completely uninterrupted hours to yourself and your work?

If a worker's motivation is slumping, it's probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools.

If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you. There's no longer this convenient excuse for why it has to be all work all the time. The opportunity to do another good day's work will come again tomorrow, even if you go home at a reasonable time.

Sleep is for the weak! Real A players only need four to five hours! Great accomplishments require great sacrifice! Bull. Shit.

Yet somehow it's still frequently seen as heroic to sacrifice yourself, your health, and even your ability to do your job just to prove your loyalty to THE MISSION. Fuck the mission. No mission (in business, anyway) is worthy of such dire personal straits.

The shared work calendar is one of the most destructive inventions of modern times. So much orbits around it, so much hinges on it, and so much is wrong because of it.

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done—the same work that you couldn't get done at work! Yes

Promises are easy and cheap to make, actual work is hard and expensive.

Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can't work calmly. When you don't trust the date, or when you think it's impossible to do everything someone's telling you to do within a specific period of time, or when someone keeps piling on more work without giving you more time, you work frantically and maniacally. Few things are as demoralizing as working on projects with no end in sight.

And between all those context switches and attempts at multitasking, you have to add buffer time. Time for your head to leave the last thing and get into the next thing. This is how you end up thinking "What did I actually do today?" when the clock turns to five and you supposedly spent eight hours at the office. You know you were there, but the hours had no weight, so they slipped away with nothing to show.

When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit. But if you start crazy, it'll define you. You have to keep asking yourself if the way you're working today is the way you'd want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not "later.

Working 40 hours a week is plenty. Plenty of time to do great work, plenty of time to be competitive, plenty of time to get the important stuff done.

Remember: Deadlines, not dreadlines.

The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don't waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.

Cuando estás inspirado eres capaz de hacer en veinticuatro horas el trabajo de dos semanas. La inspiración es como una máquina del tiempo.