Quotes About Productivity

Necessary policemen, firemen, street cleaners, health officers, judges, legislators and executives perform productive services as important as those of anyone in private industry. They make it possible for private industry to function in an atmosphere of law, order, freedom and peace. But their justification consists in the utility of their services. It does not consist in the "purchasing power" they possess by virtue of being on the public payroll.

Although a tirelessly productive author, Johnson considered himself disgracefully lazy—believing that only Presto, a dog belonging to his friend Hester Thrale, might truly be thought lazier.

We have arrived at that point of time in which we are forced to see our own humiliation, as a nation, and that a progression in this line cannot be a productive of happiness, private or public.

I just get things done instead of talking about getting them done. I don't go out and party. I don't smoke, drink or do drugs and I'm not married, that leaves a lot of time for my work.

I do my best to limit the amount of compromise in my life so I have more time to do what I want. Not hanging out with many people really helps. I am not a people person and I spend a great deal of time on my own and in this environment, I get a lot done.

Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.

Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

I must drink lots of tea or I cannot work. Tea unleashes the potential which slumbers in the depth of my soul.

Constant idleness should be included in the tortures of hell, but it is, on the contrary, considered to be one of the joys of paradise.

Loose an hour and you cannot catch up in a year.

If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father. The Einstein summation convention is the offspring of this happy marriage.

Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.

How much we get done and how well we can do it are the benchmarks of a good day or professional success. The more efficiently we produce, the better we feel. The downside, however, is that continued good feelings depend on keeping up the momentum of doing more. This doesn't come without a cost.

Until then he'd worked hard, but he got in his share of malingering like everybody else.

If everybody minded their own business, the world would go round a good deal faster than it does.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

If hunting is by definition a predatory occupation, gardening is a symbiotic one; and in the loose ecological pattern of the early garden, the interdependence of living organisms became visible, and the direct involvement of man was the very condition for productivity and creativity.

For high-achieving people, the ultimate reward for great success is not the idleness of retirement. The reward is doing more of the productive things that they love the most, which, as with Doobin, often turns out to make the most financial sense anyway.

A few years back, I had this urge to be on the go all the time. It's important to find a balance, though. Now my motto is, do the work, but recharge, too!

In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

The best advice I ever received is that there is a difference between urgency and importance: Urgent tasks seem important, but they're not. Important things need to get done.

I tend to take on too many projects at the same time, but as I've always done, I will continue to shift my focus onto whatever feels most urgent in the moment.