Quotes About Efficiency

The I.B.M. machine has no ethic of its own; what it does is enable one or two people to do the computing work that formerly required many more people. If people often use it stupidly, it's their stupidity, not the machine's, and a return to the abacus would not exorcise the failing. People can be treated as drudges just as effectively without modern machines.

Sprawl is bad aesthetics; it is bad economics. Five acres are being made to do the work of one, and do it very poorly.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

The time we lose is not in overdoing what we are about, but in doing nothing.

I am not in favor of having government do anything that private citizens can do as good or better

Marshall placed enormous trust in Eisenhower, and Ike always honored him for it. "I must have assistants who will solve their own problems," Marshall told him, "and tell me later what they have done." The historian of Eisenhower's presidency can draw a direct line between these words and Eisenhower's own management style as chief executive, when he too would look for powerful and confident lieutenants and allow them the freedom to run their own departments.

The concept that all useful information has already been factored into a stock's price, and that analysis is futile, is known as 'The Efficient Market Hypothesis' (EMH).

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can... . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the ore our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work

The bureaucracy, once noted for its efficiency and its adherence to the policy of merit-based promotion, became infused with nepotism, and the buying and selling of offices was a common practice.

efficiently the system worked. A courthouse is a factory, sorting violence into a taxonomy of crimes, processing

Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.

Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn't need it in order to be successful, or even smart.

A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.

Justice William 0. Douglas once told President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Any government bureau more than ten years old should be abolished, because after that it becomes more concerned with its image than with its mission.

What you really want is to be able to pick up a book and understand what the author is saying in the least amount of time.

In mechanical terms, humans are quite efficient converters of food into energy, so human slaves were often more valuable than animal slaves, if one could afford them.21 The importance of human beings as a source of energy helps explain why forced labor was so ubiquitous in the premodern world, just as the existence of fossil fuels helps explain why human slavery has largely vanished today.

Within a single information network, processes of collective learning may be more or less powerful in different regions; it is thus possible to imagine regions in which more information is pooled, in greater variety and in greater concentrations, than in other regions. These arguments suggest a useful general principle: the size, diversity, and efficiency of information networks should be an important large-scale determinant of rates of ecological innovation.

I have nothing against sperm banks, but they should really get rid of those automatic teller machines.

On my regularly scheduled days, I made sure to free up as much time and mind-space as I could for thinking. If you haven't gotten serious about tightening up your calendar, now is the time to start. Do you really need all those meetings? Are there ways to minimize the length of essential meetings and still make progress?

Okay, listen up! Clear your desk...NOW! Despite what some people believe, a cluttered desk does not indicate genius. Au contraire! It signals confusion and creates stress. Even mini-clutter will grow and eventually fill every inch. Keep your desk clear of everything except your project du jour and your family picture. 22

A fire department isn't a waste of tax money, even if those assigned to it spend most of the time washing their cars.

or cheaper.

I don't need my phone to play me music. I need it to be a phone and an e-mail thing.