Quotes About Efficiency

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done—the same work that you couldn't get done at work! Yes

One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone's performance.

They're need, must, can't, easy, just, only, and fast. These words get in the way of healthy communication. They are red flags that introduce animosity, torpedo good discussions, and cause projects to be late.

Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

So, coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There's no guarantee of productivity.

And between all those context switches and attempts at multitasking, you have to add buffer time. Time for your head to leave the last thing and get into the next thing. This is how you end up thinking "What did I actually do today?" when the clock turns to five and you supposedly spent eight hours at the office. You know you were there, but the hours had no weight, so they slipped away with nothing to show.

rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn't the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.

Machines can work 24/7, humans can't.

Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It's completely exhausting.

Working 40 hours a week is plenty. Plenty of time to do great work, plenty of time to be competitive, plenty of time to get the important stuff done.

If you can't fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours.

What's worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great "work ethic" because they're always around, always available, always working. That's a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who's overworked.

Given that, you're only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

That's because offices have become interruption factories. A busy office is like a food processor—it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there.

The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don't waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.

Bezos only makes decisions in the first half of the day. If any important decision comes to him after noon, he won't make it, he'll say he's waiting until the next day. Because he knows he is cognitively there in the morning, in the best possible way. The mornings are for decisions, the afternoons are not.

Don't waste time on problems you don't have yet Do you really need to worry about scaling to 100,000 customers today if it will take you two years to get there?

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes—and it will—it'll hit that much harder.

Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

great remote workers are simply great workers. They exhibit the two key qualities, as Joel Spolsky labeled them in his "Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing":fn1 Smart, and Gets Things Done.

Cuando estás inspirado eres capaz de hacer en veinticuatro horas el trabajo de dos semanas. La inspiración es como una máquina del tiempo.

Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort.