Quotes About Productivity

Amos and I enjoyed the extraordinary good fortune of a shared mind that was superior to our individual minds and of a relationship that made our work fun as well as productive.

The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.

anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure. The need for rapid switching is one of the reasons that Add-3 and mental multiplication are so difficult.

We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory.

general "law of least effort" applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs.

fairness concerns are economically significant, a fact we had suspected but did not prove. Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales. People who learned from a new catalog that the merchant was now charging less for a product that they had recently bought at a higher price reduced their future purchases from that supplier by 15%, an average loss of $90 per customer.

remarkable absence of systematic training for the essential skill of conducting efficient meetings.

Remind yourself that every second spent scrolling through social media is one you will never get back.

Like many parents, they equated normality with being happy and productive.

Tomorrow is often the busiest time of the year.

Tomorrow is the busiest day of the year.

Time is short. Don't waste it beating yourself up.

The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.

For to lose time is most displeasing to him who knows most.

The secret of getting things done is to act!

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.

But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV.

I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.

Flow is engagement on steroids. Flow is that state of being in which time stands still, you're totally engaged in an activity, and the challenge of that particular activity matches up with your skill—so you're neither bored because it's too easy nor anxious because it's too hard.

You must plan your work and then work your plan.

I finally realized that results are generated by activities. If I manage my activities then the results I want occur.

Goals Must Have a Time Limit Goals without a time limit are unable to be broken down into micro goals to measure your progress, to observe your traction. You might say, "I want to write a book." Great, when? In twenty years? In twenty months? If you don't put a deadline on the goal it will never happen and you will get to eat the bitter fruit of regret.