Quotes About Efficiency

Tools?" scoffed Kalisti, "Tools are for people who have nothing better to do than think things through and make sensible plans.

Twelve to seventeen minutes is plenty on the treadmill--if it's done fast. That's all you need for cardiovascular benefit. You don't need to spend that extra time unless you are over weight and you need to burn off extra calories. Do it vigorously, like somebody is chasing you. You've got to do it hard. Otherwise, if you just take it easy and do it longer, you are spending all that time when you don't need it. Use that extra time with your weights instead.

I prefer a bike to a horse. The brakes are more easily checked.

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically -- we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!

Don't do anything that someone else can do.

I think the biggest thing is clean as you go. Wash all your knives, cutting boards, dishes, when you are done cooking, not look at a sink full of dishes after you are done. Cleaning as you go helps keep away cross contamination and you avoid having food borne bacteria.

I held a nail in place and slammed it with the hammer. Best. Chore. Ever.

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Dottridge Bros valued their 'solemnity' but boasted that they could have a coffin 'of the most artistic finish' ready for thirty shillings in seven minutes. And speed was of the essence. Embalming did not become commonplace until the 1920s, so funerals took place as soon as possible.

No one has entered since. We know about the Wombs too, though not where they are. Incarceron is efficient; it was designed to be. It doesn't waste dead matter, but recycles everything. In those cells it grows new inmates. Perhaps animals too.

It was like he was in a contest to see who could do the least work, only he was the only contestant.

Rather than sitting and worrying, do something, anything. Worrying is a waste of time

It takes energy for new roads to diverge in new woods, and no energy is spent with complete efficiency, without waste. Where wood has burned, there will be ash. The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.

Words and students, Laurel thought—they could be recalcitrant, out of order, trying to slip by without being noticed. But once you got them working together, unobtrusive and efficient, it was beautiful.

How many social workers does it take to change a light bulb? Thirteen. One to find the bulb, and the other twelve to hold a meeting to discuss how best to change it.

value of face time: never write a memo if you can make a phone call, never make a phone call if you can meet in person.

All of the homes, shops, and office buildings in Waterford are linked by an underground package-transfer network that uses the "floater" technology. It takes approximately thirty seconds to send a package from any one place in Waterford to any other, as long as the package is within the dimensions of a typical large supermarket item

There have been several attempts at setting up electronic mail systems within the federal post office administration, but all have failed, not for technical reasons, but because the post office is resistant to change, as it is locked into a bureaucratic system in which patronage and civil-service job security are far more important than efficiency. Given that history, it seems to me more likely that electronic mail will come about through private rather than governmental action.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

In Hong Kong, some high-rises are missing all floor numbers with 4, such as 4, 14, 24, 34, and all of the 40s. That's why Hong Kong elevators are the fastest in the world: They arrive quickly at floor 50.

In the words of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them."19

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art nouveau, they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.

Buying is cheaper than asking.

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.