Quotes About Efficiency

We need to move from a culture focused on monitoring the worker's presence to a culture focused on the results.

A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof - and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is the wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established.

One loses all the time which he might employ to better purpose.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it

A thinking worker is bad business.

Mike Kelleher from Obama's Senate office was the person who stepped up to tackle the mess… He built the staff, drew up a ten-page strategic plan for the mail-room, wrote algorithms for a mail coding system, set up a casework decision tree, assembled a library of policy-response letters, and developed quality-control manuals.

One IT executive in an investment banking company claimed that 80 percent of his company's programming code was dedicated to linking disparate systems, as opposed to creating new capabilities.

The chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you've spent talking about it beforehand.

Yefgenii said, "The Americans spent millions of dollars designing a pen that would work in space. What did we do?" Gevorkian's head was down, his eyes were down. "What did we do?" Gevorkian lifted his head "We used pencils." "We used pencils.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first then implement to the interface design.

I had the worst study habits in the history of college, until I found out what I was doing wrong: highlighting with black magic marker.

We should always be in pursuit of simplicity, in whatever form it takes.

we programmers spend our lives writing code so that our fellow human beings no longer need to write code

Success is rarely determined by the quality of your ideas. But it is frequently determined by the quality of your execution.

most developers don't test at all! They key in a few values at random and click a few buttons. If they don't get any unhandled exceptions, that code is ready for QA!

Good thing you're tagging all those "Low Priority" tasks. God forbid you'd ever lose track of shit that's not worth doing.

Brevity of code Featurefulness Speed of execution Time spent coding Robustness Flexibility

Computers thwart, contort, and befuddle us. We mess around with fonts, change screen backgrounds, slow down or increase mouse speed. We tweak and we piddle. We spend countless hours preparing PowerPoint slides that most people forget in seconds. We generate reports in duplicate and triplicate and then somw that end up serving only one function for most of the recipients - to collect dust.

It's not that you can't get things done with the use of a cell phone; indeed you can get a lot of things done. However, the nature of what you get done is highly skewed. Just as the man with only a hammer sees everything as nails, the incessant cell phone user accomplishes a variety of tasks, understandably enough, that accrue directly to having a cell phone.

Soetsu Yanagi, in the "Unknown Craftsman", writes, "Man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs." For example, for optimal productivity, a carpenter needs woodworking tools and an environment conducive to his work, not a steam shovel or army tank.

Over-communication at work can create a new level of tasks and responsibilities.

Simplicity is within your grasp.

Complexity confounds and debilitates us, causing us to spend untold numbers of hours and countless sums of money to diminish or undo what perhaps didn't need to be done at all.

When it comes to energy, cost isn't everything - but it's a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.