Quotes About Efficiency

Time is the most valuable thing you have; be sure you spend it well

A five minute speech," he pointed out, "with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.

I do admire efficiency,' said Marthe. 'But how tedious it can be in excess.

At every second location Danny said monotonously, 'You can't do that,' and Plummer bridled and said, 'They built Sviajsk three years ago in four weeks. They felled the timber at Uglich and floated the logs down the Volga——' 'The cost. The cost, you fool!' Danny would scream.

To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision into everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back," said Lymond. "Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.

Experience has taught me, said Peter (...) that no situation finds Bunter unprepared. That he should have procured The Times this morning by the simple expedient of asking the milkman to request the postmistress to telephone to Broxford and have it handed to the 'bus-conductor to be dropped at the post-office and brought up by the little girl who delivers the telegrams is a trifling example of his resourceful energy.

Her faculty for hitting the right nail on the head is almost miraculous – especially as all her blows have the air of being delivered at random. Housekeeping!

So many things in this life are a waste of time

For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.

So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

It's quicker, easier, and involves less licking

And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form—www—takes three times longer to say than what it's short for)

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

So the hours are pretty good then?" he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. "Yeah," he said, "but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company.

Well, I've found the answer. Forgive me if you knew this already, perhaps I'm the last person in the world to find this out. Anyway, the answer is this: you grip the palmtop between both hands and you type with your thumbs. Seriously. It works.

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do.

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.

Total Quality Management

He stepped back to let Pendergast do his thing, but he was surprised to see the agent not going through his usual rigmarole, with the test tubes and tweezers and loupes appearing out of nowhere and interminable fussing around.