Quotes About Productivity

The lazy man does the hardest work"

Picture a company that pays its workers the bare minimum, and refuses them health insurance, paid vacation time, and other benefits. Its executives wish for profits, but lasting success cannot be built on the backs of discontented, disloyal, overworked, underproductive employees.

Wake up early. Avoid distractions. Work three to five hours a day and then enjoy the rest of the day. Be as perfectionist as you can, knowing that imperfection will still rule. Have the confidence to be magical and stretch the boundaries of your medium. Combine the tools of the medium itself with the message you want to convey. Don't get stuck in the same rut—move forward, experiment, but with the confidence built up over experience. Change the rules but learn them first.

Someone who is reinventing always has spare time. Part of reinvention is collecting little bits and pieces of time and carving them the way you want them to be. That is the Power of No in action: you say no to the superfluous distractions because you must find some time for you.

focusing your mind and making it work, you are fine-tuning it; you are turning it into an asset.

Companies simply don't need the same amount of people anymore to be as productive as they've always been. We are moving toward a society without employees. It's not here yet. But it will be. And that's okay.

Your mind desperately wants to be the BOSS. It needs you to be very, VERY BUSY with BS stuff

It's much better to work smarter, not harder.

1) Read two hours a day. 2) Write ten ideas a day. By the end of a year, you will have read for almost one thousand hours and written down 3,600 ideas.

When I was running a software company, we always knew it would take one great programmer to solve a hard problem in one night versus 10 mediocre programmers taking a month to screw up a problem even worse.

Prominent behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely has done research that tells us that the peak productivity period in a person's day is 2-5 hours after they wake up. After that, he says, there are declining returns on the work you put in.

You can't get good at something if you are working twenty hours a day. In fact, something is very wrong in your life if that is how much you are working at one thing.

Perfectionism is the enemy of the idea muscle.

Coming up with ten ideas a day is like exercise. And exercise makes the idea muscle stronger.

If I had a to-do list I might get even more stressed not getting to it. The to-do list becomes my master and I become the slave. One of my themes is "less slavery in my life.

There's a saying in Argentina, "When the CEO is looking, the cow grows fatter." A business builds fastest when the CEO is looking at it, because

It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.

What happens when you stop gossiping? You have more time (gossiping consumes a lot of time). You have more friends. You have no risk of insulting the people who you otherwise would have insulted. And you gradually move ahead in the ranks of everyone who succumbed the shortcomings of gossip.

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies—these have all replaced the middle class.

You can't get good at something if you are working 20 hours a day. In fact, something is very wrong in your life if that is how much you are working at ONE thing.

In other words, just do it. Leave behind everyone else's definitions or else you will drown in them. Why listen to him? He made 50,000 works of art in his life. On average two per day.

because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time.

We know some effective leaders who work only 40–50 hours a week, but who we nonetheless classify as very hard workers—their level of intensity and concentration when at work is incredibly high. Conversely, we know some workaholics who work 90 hours per week and are basically ineffective. More is not necessarily better.

Psychological research has shown that the most productive and happy people have a basically optimistic view of the future. We believe the same is true of companies