Quotes About Productivity

Although everyone does benefit from lower-priced goods and services, people also care greatly about the chance to be productively employed and the quality of their work. Declining employment opportunities feel real and immediate; the rise in real incomes brought by lower prices does not.

I used to pride myself on being the first in the office in the morning and one of the last to leave at night. Now, that's so dated: It's not about effort, it's about outcomes.

I feel 'proud' whenever I feel that I've worked on something for a certain amount of time with a certain amount of attention. I'm not sure if I think in terms of 'pride' though.

When I need to complete a project of primary importance, I'm around nature a lot.

I'm always up before everybody else. I also crash at 3 o'clock when everybody's at their prime.

I really believe that cultivating creativity, as a general principle, is about managing your energy.

One of the key principles we have at Amazon is 'by a fraction.' We like to get things done quickly.

In all planing you make a list and you set priorities.

I get up late, have an espresso, and immediately start work. I try to get roughly caught up on email before I leave the house, then if I need to write anything or review a complex deal, I do that, and then I head to the office and work on my top few priorities for the day. I try to schedule my meetings in the afternoon.

Every artist has different priorities. Some artists I know don't make as much music as they used to, because social media has taken over their lives. I work at what I feel is a very normal pace, and things keep clicking. It's rewarding.

Focusing on the right priorities can help you do more faster.

Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess.

The idea of investing in the positivity of employees is often low down on companies' priority lists.

Each night before I go to bed, I take out a small card and write a list of the things I need to do the next day in order of their priority.

The public don't want prisoners lying about being idle.

I like to work; I like to be creative. I work in the entertainment industry where work may come up, and it may not, so I wanted to do something proactive. I've got a brain; I don't want to just sit at home - I want to do as much as I can.

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

I have read that, when you are writing or working on something creative, and your attention wanders, your brain is processing and working on what you have just done. But I find it hard to believe that my brain is really taking five hours to fully process the seven minutes I have managed to spend focused on one thing.

For me genius is '1% inspiration and 99% procrastination.'

I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.

There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.

For me, the enemy is procrastination, and losing attention, you know? It's not the writing that's difficult, it's sitting down to write - if that makes any sense. I feel I can write pretty well, and I can write pretty effectively.

You don't get results by focusing on results. You get results by focusing on the actions that produce results.

When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.