Quotes About Efficiency

Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive.

By the time you get dressed, drive out there, play 18 holes and come home, you've blown seven hours. There are better things you can do with your time.

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

My strong point, if I have a strong point, is performance. I always do more than I say. I always produce more than I promise.

We cannot easily add lanes to roads, but we've learned how to easily add features to software. This isn't a defect of our software processes, but a virtue of the medium in which we work.

When there are two possible solutions, favor the one that is simpler and based on concrete need rather than the more intricate one that boasts of generality.

The truth is that even the most beautiful, elegant and re-usable architecture, framework or system will only be re-used by people who: a) know it is there b) know how to use it c) are convinced that it is better than doing it themselves

Treat your time as if someone is paying for it. Someone is.

reuse is properly a process issue, and individual organizations need to decide whether they believe in its long-term benefits.

My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

What Carnegie had to know personally and what he knew better than anyone else was costs. One could not control a market, although Carnegie was a superb salesman, but one could, one had to, control costs.

The most beautiful things in the world," Ford said a quarter century later, "are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated." The car he was working on would weigh five hundred pounds.

It is interesting to note, harking back again to the exponential growth of information technology, that the hardware on which Watson ran in 2011 was said to be about the size of the average bedroom. Today, we are told, it runs on a machine that is the size of three pizza boxes, and by the early 2020s Watson will sit comfortably in a smartphone.

Half of US doctors use the app known as Epocrates, a digital drug-reference resource that computerizes the task of finding out how different drugs interact. This task was once a time-consuming, often inconclusive piece of excavation from a 2,500-page drug-reference manual, known as the Physicians Desk Reference.

To put this more concretely, we argue that professional work should be decomposed, that is, broken down into its constituent 'tasks'—

Automation is what most professionals have in mind when they think of the relevance of technology for their disciplines.

This automation therefore complements but does not fundamentally change the central way in which services are delivered.

However, as Chapter 2 shows, there is a new generation of machine in action now, and these are systems (much more of which in Chapter 4) that can replace parts of, and sometimes all of, certain kinds of professional work.

The first is the notion that machines and systems will work alongside tomorrow's professionals as partners. The challenge here is to allocate tasks, as between human beings and machines, according to their relative strengths.

Readers may call us radical, but if we can foresee a day when the average laptop has more processing power than all of humanity combined, then it might be time for professionals to revisit some of their current working practices.

Checklists, which are a form of routinization, 'remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit'.

The first is for in-house departments not only to be vastly more efficient in their deployment of the traditional combination of internal labour and external law firms, but also to ensure that work is undertaken, where appropriate, by less costly suppliers of legal services, such as legal process outsourcers and paralegals.

El futuro del servicio jurídico no son Grisham ni Rumpole, (1) ni sus pelucas, sus salas de audiencias recubiertas de madera, sus volúmenes forrados en cuero o su argot jurídico arcaico. Ni siquiera es ya hoy dominante el modelo de abogacía concebido como un servicio de asesoría profesional individualizada, desempeñada por abogados que reciben a sus clientes en sus despachos, ya sean esplendorosos o polvorientos, y ofrecen su orientación jurídica a medida.