Quotes About Time

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can't be found. Instead, it's just one interruption after another.

soon you'll see that it's the work—not the clock—that matters.

Commuting isn't just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment—it's bad for business. And it doesn't have to be that way.

But the thing is, there's not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there's hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it.

Change makes things worse all the time. It's easier to fuck up something that's working well than it is to genuinely improve it. But we commonly delude ourselves into thinking that more time, more investment, more attention is always going to win.

Not doing something that isn't worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.

what doesn't get done in 40 hours by Friday at 5 picks up again Monday morning at 9.

Don't fill your day with five more just to stay busy or feel productive. Not doing something that isn't worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.

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.

Taking someone's time should be a pain in the ass. Taking many people's time should be so cumbersome that most people won't even bother to try it unless it's REALLY IMPORTANT! Meetings should be a last resort, especially big ones.

When someone takes your time, it doesn't cost them anything, but it costs you everything.

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

The person making the pitch has presumably put a lot of time, thought, and energy into gathering their thoughts and presenting them clearly to an audience. But the rest of the people in the room are asked to react. Not absorb, not think it over, not consider—just react. Knee-jerk it. That's no way to treat fragile new ideas.

So take a step toward calm, and relieve people from needing to broadcast their whereabouts and status. Everyone's status should be implicit: I'm trying to do my job, please respect my time and attention.

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

Todos tenemos ideas. Las ideas son inmortales. Duran siempre. Lo que no dura siempre es la inspiración. Es como la fruta fresca o la leche: tiene fecha de caducidad. Si quieres hacer algo, tienes que hacerlo ahora.

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?

Remember, there's no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you're in a room with five people for an hour, it's a five-hour meeting.

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

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.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.