Quotes About Productivity

The time we lose is not in overdoing what we are about, but in doing nothing.

Repose is necessary to great efforts, and he who is never idle, labours in vain!

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can... . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the ore our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.

Watch me work! Watch me work! Watch me work!

Using guilt is not productive. Appealing to the greatness of others is what works for Warren, and it will work for you.

designate two or three days each month as "X" days, during which they wouldn't schedule any meetings. I'd spend some of those days alone thinking about our businesses.

On my regularly scheduled days, I made sure to free up as much time and mind-space as I could for thinking. If you haven't gotten serious about tightening up your calendar, now is the time to start. Do you really need all those meetings? Are there ways to minimize the length of essential meetings and still make progress?

Okay, listen up! Clear your desk...NOW! Despite what some people believe, a cluttered desk does not indicate genius. Au contraire! It signals confusion and creates stress. Even mini-clutter will grow and eventually fill every inch. Keep your desk clear of everything except your project du jour and your family picture. 22

Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make yourself a happier and more productive person.

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

The fifth secret may well be the most important: personal respect and affection. Visitors to Yale's Investments Office are invariably impressed by the open architecture and informal "happy ship" climate that is almost as obvious as the disciplined intensity with which the staff work at their tasks and responsibilities. Positive professionals perform at their peak productivity and teams get better with low turnover.

A los escritores los hace tan felices la idea de llevar a cabo alguna tarea doméstica! Les gusta compensar sus vagabundeos nebulosos con un frenético interés por lo concreto.

Il arrive si souvent qu'une action trop spontanée soit contre-productive

What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there's nothing for them to do, they still can't admit it openly.

Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it's better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends' complex polyamorous love affairs.

As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn't have time to do much else.

There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

politically, there is no better way to ensure people are not politically active or aware than to have them working, commuting to work, or preparing for work every moment of the day.

The less the value of work is seen to lie either in what it produces, or the benefits it provides to others, the more work comes to be seen as valuable primarily as a form of self-sacrifice, which means that anything that makes that work less onerous or more enjoyable, even the gratification of knowing that one's work benefits others, is actually seen to lower its value—and as a result, to justify lower levels of pay.