Quotes About Efficiency

If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father. The Einstein summation convention is the offspring of this happy marriage.

How much we get done and how well we can do it are the benchmarks of a good day or professional success. The more efficiently we produce, the better we feel. The downside, however, is that continued good feelings depend on keeping up the momentum of doing more. This doesn't come without a cost.

In fact, you cannot condemn torture on political grounds, because in most cases it is perfectly efficient and the torturers get what they want. You can condemn it only on moral grounds and then, necessarily, everywhere in the same way, in Batista's Cuba or in Castro's Cuba, in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.

The room filled with a collective rustling of paper, like a flock of birds taking off. Heads bowed in unison. Quentin recognized this motion. It was the motion of a bunch of high-powered type-A test killers getting down to their bloody work. That was all right. He was one of them.

Curtsy while you're thinking what to say. It saves time.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

What made the new world picture so potent was that its method of deliberately ignoring the complex reality of organisms was an immense labor-saving device: its pragmatic efficiency counterbalanced its conceptual superficiality. The universe as a whole, the whole that contains all other wholes, is immeasurable and unthinkable in its infinite variety and multi-fold concreteness. Only by samples and abstractions can one put together in the mind a playtoy model.

The point I am making is that if craftsmanship had not been condemned to death by starvation wages and meager profits, if it had, in fact, been protected and subsidized as so many of the new mechanical industries were in fact extravagantly subsidized, right down to the jet planes and rockets today, our technology as a whole, even that of 'fine technics' would have been immensely richer-and more efficient.

But perhaps the greatest threat to the efficiency of the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose.

The aim of industry is not primarily to satisfy essential human needs with a minimal productive effort, but to multiply the number of needs, factitious or fictitious, and accommodate them to the maximum mechanical capacity to produce profits. These are the sacred principles of the power complex.

Too many people start their day like a five-alarm fire. Instead, I teach people to start their day a little earlier than they usually do, and urge them to take the time to prepare, to practise, so when you get to work, it's show time and you're at your best.

My dad ran a few marathons; I fight the urge to do the same because I know that it's not the most efficient way to train unless you're preparing for an event similar in nature, which baseball players are not.

We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.

In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.

I have a sense of urgency, of time. I am a woman and am always running between work, doctors' appointments, school meetings, filling up the fridge, then going back to work. Like everyone who combines professional and family life, I am always doing several things at the same time.

The best advice I ever received is that there is a difference between urgency and importance: Urgent tasks seem important, but they're not. Important things need to get done.

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can't give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we're constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most.

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

There are different usage patterns - I never do email during the day. I don't multitask well at all. I don't know how to be in a meeting and participate and be on email at the same time. I do see some people do it more effectively. I've never quite figured that out.

No business is good when, on the last day of the month, you're like, 'What was the usage for the month?'

Every inch of my writing career has been influenced by my screenwriting education. I was lucky enough to go to film school at USC, and I got a crash course in how to tell a story efficiently. I learned structure, pace, my style, how to know your audience, and most importantly, how to take criticism and edits properly.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

I've learned how to use my spam filter pretty effectively.