Quotes About Productivity

The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing.

I have worked all my life. In all that remains of my life I must work. I have no complaints against work. To work is normal.

Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.

In our erotic life work does not work…trying is always trying too hard. Eroticism is an imaginative act, and you can't measure it. We glorify efficiency and fail to recognize that the erotic space is a radiant interlude in which we luxuriate, indifferent to demands of productivity; pleasure is the only goal.

We haven't the time to take our time.

Flexibility and choice for workers create higher levels of trust, ownership of work, and productivity among knowledge workers than work arrangements defined by constant monitoring and set hours and locations.

it sometimes seems to me the entire postmodern assault on the concept of truth has been staged to avoid just this conclusion: some cultures are simply more productive than others

Unfortunately I'm one of those people who writes better when they're unhappy.

I don't want my friends to be hurt and think I've dropped them but I haven't got time to sit and gossip, I've got things to do and time is precious.

I never liked the way time went by when I worked for Sebastian. It wasn't that it dragged; it was completely the opposite. I would look up and discover that I had been swimming for hours and had never lifted my head up long enough to realize it. If anything, it contradicted the expression, Time flies when you're having fun. Time just evaporated

Churchill's written output was similarly immense. He published 6.1 million words in thirty-seven books – more than Shakespeare and Dickens combined – and delivered five million in public speeches, not counting his voluminous letter- and memorandum-writing.

Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.

The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.

There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity.

if we want to cultivate achievement-driven motivation, we need to create an environment that values and emphasizes output.

the real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented meetings.

Managerial productivity—that is, the output of a manager per unit of time worked—can be increased in three ways: 1.  Increasing the rate with which a manager performs his activities, speeding up his work. 2.  Increasing the leverage associated with the various managerial activities. 3.  Shifting the mix of a manager's activities from those with lower to those with higher leverage.

The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).

Which five would they be? Put another way, which five pieces of information would you want to look at each day, immediately upon arriving at your office?

Most people use their calendars as a repository of "orders" that come in. Someone throws an order to a manager for his time, and it automatically shows up on his calendar. This is mindless passivity. To gain better control of his time, the manager should use his calendar as a "production" planning tool, taking a firm initiative to schedule work that is not time-critical between those "limiting steps" in the day.

To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1.  You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2.  You should say "no" at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.

As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates.