Quotes About Efficiency

he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts.

For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful.

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.

The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.

you can`t recycle wasted time

Competition between businesses creates better products and services, as well as lower prices. It encourages entrepreneurship and fosters good, hard work. The competition of free enterprise is a major reason businesses are usually more efficient and productive than government.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realized, the quicker he worked.

It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins.

One cannot manage too many affairs: like pumpkins in the water, one pops up while you try to hold down the other.

Don't waste good iron for nails or good men for soldiers

or incompleteness, either in the physical or in the emotional personality of a man, he is not capable of invoking and directing thereafter the efficient play of his emotional and intellectual abilities.

What's working and how can we do more of it?" That's the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, "I've always been a believer that if I've got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.

Good ideas are often adopted quickly. When all retailers adopt centralized checkout as a "best practice," it's no longer a competitive advantage for anyone.

Checklists educate people about what's best, showing them the ironclad right way to do something.

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that "process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six." Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic.

They think if something is simple enough to be put in a checklist, a monkey can do it. Well, if that's true, grab a pilot's checklist and try your luck with a 747.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question "What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that "process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six." Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: "Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing." To

Picking out tiny chunks of work at a time stays the panic.

community for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating.

has a problem focus when he needs a solution focus. If you are a manager, ask yourself: "What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that "process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six." Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: "Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.