Quotes About Productivity

Regret for wasted time is more wasted time

In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.

The great success of ants and termites – between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals – is undoubtedly down to their division of labour.

The Brazilian diplomat Josué de Castro, in his book The Geopolitics of Hunger, was even bolder in his criticism of the neo-Malthusians, saying that 'The road to survival, therefore, does not lie in the neo-Malthusian prescriptions to eliminate surplus people, nor in birth control, but in the effort to make everybody on the face of the earth productive.' In

today people farm (i.e., plough, crop or graze) just 38 per cent of the land area of the earth, whereas with 1961 yields they would have to farm 82 per cent to feed today's population.

Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And, once again, notice that the true metric of prosperity is time. If Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by granting you a dollop of free time.

This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.

In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs, which means you can invest in something new that will bring even greater reward.

That is possible only because each square metre is encouraged to grow whatever it is good at growing and global trade distributes the result to ensure that everybody gets a bit of everything

a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work'.

Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a month. We overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade. by Matthew Kelly from the book The Long View

Money is for doing things, my love. Don't sit on it like a hen sits on an egg. It doesn't hatch. I should know. I've made enough of it.

I am out of ideas and need to conserve my energy so I can freak out more efficiently.

It was a good brain, but it had only two modes—fog and frenzy.

Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people." (578)

the penalizing of ability for being ability, the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity.

What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.

there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value.

before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people.

I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for.

I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for.

will, when he gets here. But, boy!—I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production." "Who's that?" "Hank Rearden.