Quotes About Efficiency

Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion.

With a fourth generation of nuclear power, you can have a technology that will burn more than 99 percent of the energy in the fuel. It would mean that you don't need to mine uranium for the next thousand years.

He devoted a considerable amount of his acute intelligence to the cause of doing as little as possible.

Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue Chang - Lost Horizon (1933)

Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue...

You don't compete against products and services in your category: you compete against anything that gets the job done from the user's point of view.

Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.

Good interviewers share three features. They . . . obtain the greatest amount of accurate information relevant to diagnosis and management, in the shortest period of time, consistent with creating and maintaining a good working relationship (rapport) with the patient.

Ockham's disposable razors

While a machine greatly aids the operator in such tasks, it also disciplines its operator. As the machine might be considered the extended arms and legs of the worker, the worker might be considered an extension of the machine. All machines, and especially very complicated machines, require operators to place themselves in a provided location and to perform functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the machine. To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine.

To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does.

Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation.

Do we fulfill our obligations by being practical all the time?

I simply cannot understand unpunctuality. Why should anybody be late? I know exactly how long it takes me to dress.

File cabinets were closed with determined thuds like mortar rounds going off, and the rapid chatter of typewriter keys sounded like machine guns strafing the paper into submission.

Hiring quotas reduce efficiency.

What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly. Or, rather, what makes a system successful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off. Sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest.

Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.

It is surprising," Roosevelt explained, "how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.

As soon as (Teddy Roosevelt) received an assignment for a paper or project, he would set to work, never leaving anything to the last minute. Prepared so far ahead freed his mind from worry and facilitated fresh, lucid thought.

Wilson argued that "the wealth of America" lay in its small businesses, its towns and villages. "Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago," he asserted; "it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the borders of the town.

As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. "It is never well to take drastic action," he liked to say, "if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.

Roosevelt seemed to feel," Harrison remarked, "that everything ought to be done before sundown.

He always carried a book with him to the Executive Office," Taft noted, "and although there were but few intervals during the business hours, he made the most of them in his reading.