Quotes About Time

No doubt, some people are quantitatively less busy than others and some much more so, but that doesn't change the shared experience: most everyone I know feels frazzled and overwhelmed most of the time.

I really, genuinely don't look at my schedule too often, because when I do, I get a little overwhelmed by how much is going on.

We have become so obsessed with getting rid of people who are burdened with the characterization overhead that we have ended up with organizations where many high-priced knowledge workers and managers are spending as much as a quarter of their time being their own overhead.

A policy of "Quality—If Time Permits" will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the product. Hewlett-Packard

each switch imposes a direct penalty of a bit more than twenty minutes of lost concentration.

Authoritarian management is obsessed with time. It is destructive of slack and inclined to goad people into outperforming their peers. And it makes learning impossible.

A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average quality.

Does the overall effort have both a schedule and a goal, where the schedule and the goal are markedly different? If the schedule is the goal, there is no risk management at work. The earliest date by which the work could conceivably be done makes an excellent goal but an awful schedule.

People under time pressure don't work better - they just work faster.

There are a million ways to loose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back.

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management.

A company in this kind of flux can be viewed as a portfolio of projects. Each project seeks to effect some change. In an older, simpler time, projects were a way to move from one status quo to another. The project was a disruption, but the new status quo, once established, could be expected to last for an extended period. Now there is no new status quo.

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. They are more likely to be frustrated by wasted time than enjoy it.

people aren't inclined to work on tasks in the wrong order, since they derive satisfaction from accomplishment, and a motivation toward meaningful accomplishment tends to steer them onto the critical path. A little pressure might decrease wasted time slightly and cause an equally slight improvement in focusing on the critical path.

More important than any gimmick you introduce is a change in attitude. People must learn that it's okay sometimes not to answer their phones, and they must learn that their time–not just the quantity but its quality–is important.

Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes quality as its enemy. That's why many corporate Quality Programs are really Quality Reduction Programs in disguise.

Although your staff may be exposed to the message "work longer and harder" while they're at the office, they're getting a very different message at home. The message at home is, "Life is passing you by. Your laundry is piling up in the closet, your babies are uncuddled, your spouse is starting to look elsewhere. There is only one time around on this merry-go-round called life, only one shot at the brass ring. And if you use your life up on C++ . . .

People under time pressure don't think faster."    Ã¢â'¬â€Tim Lister Think rate is fixed. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can't pick up the pace of thinking.

When companies can't invent, it's usually because their people are too damn busy.

we don't work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on time.

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.

I like physics. I think it is the best science out of all three of them, because generally it's more useful. You learn about speed and velocity and time, and that's all clever stuff.

One thing that people keep on saying to me is that the wealth and the fame must have made up for missing out on my childhood. But the idea of money - putting a price on your childhood - is ridiculous. You will never get those years back and you can't put a price on them.

From the time we're born until we die, we're kept busy with artificial stuff that isn't important.