Quotes About Productivity

I don't surf the net in general. I have someone do it for me instead, because I find it sluggish.

I have a small studio set up in my house in Athens. I'll wake up, have a nice breakfast, and I won't surface until dinnertime. I'm very domesticated in that way.

If employees need to stay late in order to curry favor with the boss, what motivation do they have to get work done during normal business hours? After all, they can put in the requisite 'face time' whether they are surfing the Internet or analyzing customer data.

I don't distract myself from work stuff with funny emails and surfing the internet when I'm at work; I don't distract myself from my family when I'm with them.

One would expect that a surge of new automation opportunities in highly paid work would catalyze a surge of corporate investment in computer hardware and software. Instead, the opposite occurred.

You need a place to work that works for you, and you need people to understand that when you are writing, you are doing a rarefied type of brain surgery and therefore should not be subject to a million random interruptions.

I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready.

I think you'll be surprised at how much more production you can get out of employees if you respect them, befriend them, let them know they're crucial to the company - and then show by example how important it is to put their nose to the grindstone.

The surprising question we get is, 'How many people telecommute at Google?' And our answer is, 'As few as possible.'

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them." ? Raymond Chandler

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for the United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world which seems to be accelerating around them.

Even so, at times stress is inevitable, and seven-day-week-style activities, such as golf before a conference call, or a break on the beach between inventories, help reduce it to reasonable levels. Executives who are embarrassed to take these breaks or companies that frown on them are shortsighted. Stress is a major disruption; and its effects, such as burnout, are grim reapers for talented people.

Once employees feel challenged, invigorated, and productive, their efforts will naturally translate into profit and growth for the organization.

What's important to understand about the seven-day weekend is that by redesigning the architecture of time, we can make room for work, leisure, and idleness. All three can coexist and harmonize together to produce happiness and a sense of purpose.

Zemurray was not old and was still angry, easy to insult, easy to incense, driven, and restless. Show me a happy man and I will show you a man who is getting nothing accomplished in this world.

Most people have it backward. When they are feeling down, they roll up their sleeves and get to work. They take their low moods very seriously and try to figure out and analyze what's wrong. They try to force themselves out of their low state, which tends to compound the problem rather than solve it.

Let Go of the Idea that Gentle, Relaxed People Can't Be Superachievers

My untidy habits drive me to follow the slash-and-burn (or Mad Hatter) principle. Work on a virgin table until the mess becomes unbearable, then move on to a clean table in a clean room — or, on a beautiful summer day like this, one of the five tables dotted around the garden. Trash that table and move on again.

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives.

How good a predictor of job productivity is a cognitive test score compared to a job interview? Reference checks? College transcript? The answer, probably surprising to many, is that the test score is a better predictor of job performance than any other single measure. This is the conclusion to be drawn from a meta-analysis on the different predictors of job performance, as shown in the table below.

There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse, with significant economic consequences.