Quotes About Efficiency

Set a timer on your phone for twenty-five minutes.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (2010) By Laura Vanderkam

A brief reminder of the purpose of their work doubled their performance.

We sent a robot to do a man's job.

The average user doesn't give a damn what happens, as long as (1) it works and (2) it's fast.

I don't care where you think your resources are going. If you know, show me the measurements. If you don't, stop wasting my time.

most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don't waste time on decisions that don't matter, or more accurately, when we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy.

What are the determinants in how we age? The different systems in our brains age at different rates. Some systems decline as others actually increase in efficiency and effectiveness. The basic message

That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming

Getting organized can bring us all to the next level in our lives.

Recall that being organized and conscientious are predictive of a number of positive outcomes, even decades later, such as longevity, overall health, and job performance.

The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.

Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.

Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting, and at the same time, we are all doing more. Consequently

El ejercicio aeróbico no sólo es beneficioso para los sistemas cardiovascular y músculo-esquelético, sino también para el sistema nervioso. Aprendemos con más eficacia cuando estamos activos físicamente.

In some areas these checklists have dramatically reduced human error and the resulting complications, including death.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on specialization: on letting people concentrate on what they do best and trade with others who specialize in other things.

Even when I was working at The Village Voice, I only put in about 20 hours at the office.

Jeff Sachs has the Millennium Villages. He spends $2.5 million in one village. It's an absolutely ridiculous model, because I've said that if you gave me $2.5 million, I can train 100 grandmothers, solar electrify 100 villages - 10,000 houses - and save you 100,000 litres of kerosene.

When I had a side-by-side-style freezer, I kept everything - soup, ground meat, steaks, cooked rice - frozen in flat packs that I filed away vertically like vinyl records.