Quotes About Efficiency

There's a myth that time is money. In fact, time is more precious than money. It's a nonrenewable resource. Once you've spent it, and if you've spent it badly, it's gone forever.

The formal operational thinker has the ability to consider many different solutions to a problem before acting. This greatly increases efficiency, because the individual can avoid potentially unsuccessful attempts at solving a problem. The formal operational person considers past experiences, present demands, and future consequences in attempting to maximize the success of his or her adaptation to the world.

In the space age, man will be able to go around the world in two hours - one hour for flying and one hour to get to the airport.

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.

Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.

The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.

Why waste yourself doing something pointless, when you can spend your life being productive in your own eyes?

Least Action is the minim- um of energy, multiplied by the minimum of time.

No matter who you are, your progress and success in life will depend, more than any other factor, on how you invest the twenty-four hours you're blessed with each day.

Money, it is conventional to argue, is a medium of exchange, which has the advantage of eliminating inefficiencies of barter; a unit of account, which facilitates valuation and calculation; and a store of value, which allows economic transactions to be conducted over long periods as well as geographical distances. To perform all these functions optimally, money has to be available, affordable, durable, fungible, portable and reliable.

Because of our tendency to want what others want, and because of our inclination to see the choices of others as an efficient way to understand the world, our social networks can magnify what starts as an essentially random variation.

Ett val som bygger på nätverksteori kan vara sjuhundra gånger effektivare och mer ändamålsenligt [än ett slumpmässigt urval].

but an elliptical tower with one gun and two carronades could be built for a fifth of the price,

Ganteaume had twenty-one fighting ships under his command, but trained crews for only seven.

But except in rare circumstances, you can train until you're blue in the face and you'd never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time." What we're doing when we multitask "is learning to be skillful at a superficial level." The Roman philosopher Seneca May have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere.

Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn't make sense," he says. "It's not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web." As soon as you learn to be "a skilled hunter" online, he argues, books become superfluous.

Google, as the supplier of the Web's principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.

The airplane was a complicated system encompassing many components, but to a skilled pilot it still had the intimate quality of a hand tool. The love that lays the swale in rows is also the love that parts the clouds for the stick-and-rudder man.

I felt lost without the Delete key, the scrollbar, the cut and paste functions, the Undo command. I had to do all my editing on-screen. In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself.

Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing.

We'll know that Google has truly fulfilled its vision when the Googleplex no longer needs toilets at all.

THE TROUBLE with automation is that it often gives us what we don't need at the cost of what we do.