Quotes About Efficiency

How you meet your own commitments is important. Are you doing it by draining energy—driving people relentlessly, or burning them out by making impossible demands? Or are you expanding the capacity of the organization by helping people grow and expand their own capacities? In other words, there's a right and a wrong way to delegate.

Foulgrin's Rule Twenty-Three: tactics without strategy are useless.

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

Kill two birds with one stone, feed the homeless to the hungry.

Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying.

The zipper displaces the button, and a man lacks that much time to think while dressing at dawn...

Better than putting things in the attic you never use again. This way, you get to live the summer over for a minute or two here or there along the way through the winter, and when the bottles are empty the summer's gone for good and no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about for you to stumble over forty years from now. Clean, smokeless, efficient, that's dandelion wine. (page 266 in the 1975 hardback)

emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing the machines rather than how to run the machines.

It would have been so much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency — the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends.

What saves us is efficiency--the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force-- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

This is why the attainment of proficiency, the pushing of your skill with attention to the most delicate shades of excellence, is a matter of vital concern.  Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread.  But there is something beyond—a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art—which is art.

devoción a la eficiencia.

What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency.

efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Los legisladores deberían centrarse siempre en cualquier mercado con rentas excesivas, pues son un indicador de que la economía podría funcionar más eficientemente: en realidad, la explotación inherente a estas termina debilitando la economía. Una batalla exitosa contra la búsqueda de renta redunda en redirigir los recursos hacia la creación de riqueza.

markets on their own will fail to achieve shared and sustainable prosperity. Markets play an invaluable role in any well-functioning economy and yet they often fail to produce fair and efficient outcomes, producing too much of some things (pollution) and too little of others (basic research).

À semelhança das medalhas olímpicas e troféus de ténis, significavam apenas que o possuidor fizera algo sem vantagem para ninguém mais eficientemente que qualquer outra pessoa.

Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes...

multitasking isn't actually possible. In the same way that we can only focus on one sense perception, we can really only focus on one task at a time.

Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.

premature optimization is the root of all evil. —Donald E. Knuth [

In other words, it is about 50 times slower to create and destroy objects with finalizers.