Quotes About Productivity

ECCO was still spending only 5 percent of its revenues on engineering, as compared to 3 percent a decade earlier. That was possible because of the dramatic increase in productivity that accompanied the changes. In 1994, the company had had $70,000 in sales per employee. By 2004, the figure had more than doubled to $156,000 in sales per employee. At the same time, technological advances allowed the company to respond more quickly to customers needs, and to do it at a dramatically lower cost.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.

The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is an euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.

La principale différence entre le travail et les loisirs est la suivante : au boulot, au moins, l'avachissement et l'aliénation sont rémunérés.

Obnubilés par la productivité, nos contemporains sont à l'évidence très en retard, en matière de réduction du temps de travail, sur ces sociétés archaïques. S'ils nous voyaient, les moujiks surexploités se demanderaient pour quelle étrange raison nous continuons de travailler. Nous devrions sans répit nous poser la même question.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous.

Whoever said being anxious gets more accomplished?

you happen to be in management, please read the next few sentences very carefully. One of the five basic needs of human kind is appreciation. From an economic point of view, showing appreciation will earn you more money than if you do not practice appreciation.

What makes their new campaign so awful is that they're trying to convince business travelers that flying Southwest will make us more "productive." Right. That's the big airline issue for me. Not price. Not schedule. Not comfort. Not reliability. "Bob, what airline you wanna take?" "I don't know. Which one makes me more productive?" It's such a moronic strategy, it can only have come from a trained marketing professional.

I get up at 4:30 in the morning, seven days a week, no matter where I am in the world.

The best way to do something 'lean' is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very little time.

Efficiency, Peter said, is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.

Working right through lunch is a false economy. The value of that extra time at your desk or in saved expenses pales in comparison to the cost of a lost opportunity to learn or grow or to invest in an employee. If you skip lunch or eat lunch alone, you are wasting opportunities.

How we use our time reflects our priority in achieving our goals.

I'm convinced that none of the important achievements in human history were accomplished before ten-thirty or eleven in the morning!"17

Forget about style; worry about results.

I have calmed down a little and my work is going better than yesterday, so well, in fact, that it does itself and I can slip back into the womb of time, into my youth, when I ironed my trousers and shined my shoes, soles included, every Saturday, because when you're young you love keeping clean, you love your self-image, an image you still have time to improve.

Mind unemployed is mind unenjoyed.

The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.

In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.

During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn't take that well. "The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority," he answered bluntly. "That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can't excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.

Don't complain to your boss. He wants solutions; not just problems.

Our society doesn't promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn't sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now. Also, people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves tend to pass it on. I'm sure you've noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others.

When you have a plan put it into action instantly. Don't let it lie around and get stale and have other people start thinking about it themselves.