Quotes About Efficiency

Assign someone who isn't actively participating in the discussion to be the scribe, responsible for taking accurate notes. Session notes should contain an attendee list, invitees who did not attend, decisions made, actions to be taken and who is responsible for each, outstanding issues, and the high points of key discussions.

I have a little kitchen office at home, where I do all my kids' stuff.

Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.

Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?

The "rain bath," as the shower was called, was the simplest, quickest, cheapest, cleanest and withal best bath for people's bath houses; the one which requires the least space, the least time, the least amount of water, the least fuel for warming water, the least attendance, the least cost of maintenance. Standing

I'm really proud of myself because I've pared my beauty regimen down to a cream blush and berry-tinted lip balm, which has saved me so much time.

The complexity and efficiency of the physicist's technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystic's consciousness—both physical and spiritual—in deep meditation.

Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and thus are essentially waste. The pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by the waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes. Indeed, as we discuss in Chapter 17, the

The great advantage of digital media is that it can be stored, retrieved and massaged by a computer—at lightning speed and with unerring accuracy.

Code writers, like engineers generally, tend to get sidetracked by interesting but irrelevant conundrums.

Compact code was inherently good since it consumed less internal memory. Consisting of slivers of silicon chips called DRAM ("dynamic-random-access-memories"), internal memory was like a gas tank. The larger the tank, the farther the car would go. The smaller the operating program, the more gas was left for all other programs. Because

Most code writers were like gifted athletes; they learned by doing and could not explain their actions. They just did it. This method, while fine for getting started, often hampered efforts at making code faster, which required unblinking self-analysis. "The secret to optimizing speed" he said, "is to ask yourself, 'What does this code actually need to do? What's the least work I can do to solve this problem?' " All

The veterans would spend so much time tutoring the novices that they would lose track of their work. And by the time the new hires learned enough really to help, the group would have missed the deadline anyway. "For the same reason," Perazzoli said, "your wife's not going to have a baby in three months if you give her two more people." Even

Better to release the first version sooner with less. His was a less-now, more-later ethic. Robert

As software pundit Fred Brooks once observed, "How does a project get to be a year late?... One day at a time." In

Gates had a notion that only solid code writers should manage and all managers of code writers should keep writing code.

In a certain sense, choosing an operating system was similar to buying a car. Besides the purchase price, there was a cost of ownership. The size of an operating system largely determined the amount of memory required by the computer. Just as some cars guzzled gas, some operating systems consumed large amounts of memory.

Do everything quickly and well.

She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable.

the dignity and sobriety of old public buildings, their temple facades, would be assaulted and covered over by indiscriminate modernity; that new buildings, more severely efficient, would eventually replace them.

You know, I lose patience really easily I'd rather shop in the grocery store than in the department store. I can pick an apple like nobody's business.

We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.

Civilization had long maintained the appearance of such communal closeness, in small units people could manage. Societies had evolved that could stack such social nuggets into vaster larger arrays. A squad of ten worked well together, and united with ten other squads could do far more. Those ten who commanded squads could then meet in a room and make up a squad themselves, and so on up a pyramid that could sum the labours of billions. All

You need someone to tell you how to do things like hitting your marks, or driving a car so it looks right or getting out of a car so it doesn't take a million years of screen time.