Quotes About Efficiency

Your car should drive itself. It's amazing to me that we let humans drive cars... It's a bug that cars were invented before computers.

Done is better than perfect if perfect ain't done.

took ten years and $5 billion to sequence the first human genome, and now it takes less than twenty-four hours and costs less than $1,500.5

As we reviewed in Chapter 7, we will get away from keyboards in the office, also known as "death by a thousand clicks," and replace them with computer processing of natural language into notes.98–100

much process innovation by manufacturers occurs on the factory floor as they produce

so. In contrast, the custom manufacturer wants to lower its

It is slothful not to compress your thoughts," he said.

It is always goodWhen a man has two irons in the fire.

This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

For thousands of years, servants and slaves--or in lesser households, wives and daughters--were stuck with the same pestles and sieves, with few innovations. This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

Christine Frederick's rational kitchen had been driven by efficiency: the fewest steps, the fewest utensils. The new ideal kitchens were far more opulent. These were dollhouses for grown women, packed with the maximum number of trinkets. The aim was not to save labor but to make the laborers forget they were working.

We often overattribute efficiency to the technologies we are accustomed to.

But I am busiest outside of my teaching classes. Do you know any other business or profession where highly-skilled specialists are required to tally numbers, alphabetize cards, put notices into mailboxes, and patrol the lunchroom?

Get to it, already. I'm working the afternoon shift and I don't want to be late.

One of his more famous sound bites was, 'If you want something done, hire someone competent and then give them what they ask for.

All I do, really, is go to work and try to be professional, be on time and be prepared.

A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport?' 'Yes, boss... it's true. There's hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly underfunded, and hence the entire population is stuck in traffic

Operation Claret proceeded with the sort of smoothness that suggested no one in authority was paying adequate attention.

It takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless

which would cut into my prep time.

Obama also urged streamlining overlapping regulatory agencies (without getting into specifics),

Tim was operating with a very lean staff.

Making a robot that simulates what a human does has value, but I'm more attracted to making supertools that dramatically amplify human abilities by a hundred- or thousand-fold.

What perhaps began as a consensual, communal undertaking evolved into a highly centralised, highly unequal society. There was probably no sudden change or power grab: each generation built on the work of the last, and strides in efficiency were paid for with small sacrifices of freedom and equality. Rewarding labour with grants of food from the benevolent temple became, in time, a way of compelling hard work through the control of rations.