Quotes About Efficiency

I take business decisions all day every day, from home, from the bath.

A teleporter would be nice. There are lots of places I want to go, but getting there is a pain.

I just try to get the most out of every day and be prepared for anything.

Food is no longer sacred to us: in becoming too efficient we've changed its nature.

There's enough time in the day: If you go to bed at 10 and start your day at 6, there's a lot you can do in a day!

You get much more done if you go to bed early and get up early.

A Mac PowerBook is a thing to behold.

Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.

I know that for most people, seeing is believing when it comes to government efficiency.

A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence--the lapses of consciousness, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes--all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

In a twenty-first-century hour when the presidency has more in common with reality television or professional wrestling, it's useful to recall how the most consequential of our past presidents have unified and inspired with conscious dignity and conscientious efficiency.

I think there needs to be a meeting to set an agenda for more meetings about meetings.

People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were—stupid.

Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email.

He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. ("Sixty's too bright," he said, "and forty is too dim.

From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of broilers increased by 65%, while their time-to-market dropped 60% and their feed requirements dropped 57%. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be 300 pounds in 10 years, while eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.

Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination. If it were only for efficiency, that would be one thing, but these animals literally can't reproduce naturally. Tell me what could be sustainable about that?

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos. Mejor procedimiento es simular que esos libros ya existen y ofrecer un resumen, un comentario.

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary … More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books. —Prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths, 10 November 1941

An empty desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.

He had recorded in canto 8 how Plato the Idealist 'went to Dionysius of Syracuse | Because he had observed that tyrants | Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to'; but had he taken the point of the story, that Plato found 'he was unable to persuade Dionysius to any amelioration'?

I can write faster than anybody who can write better, and I can write better than anybody who can write faster.