Quotes About Productivity

Thanks to technology, we are probably as productive in two days as we previously were in five. But thanks to greed and some busy-bee syndrome of productivity, we are still asked to slave away for the profit of others ahead of our own nonremunerated ambitions. Whether

If 37 percent to 40 percent of jobs are completely pointless, and at least 50 percent of the work done in nonpointless office jobs is equally pointless, we can probably conclude that at least half of all work being done in our society could be eliminated without making any real difference at all.

We could easily become societies of leisure and institute a twenty-hour workweek. Maybe even a fifteen-hour week. Instead, we find ourselves, as a society, condemned to spending most of our time at work, performing tasks that we feel make no difference in the world whatsoever.

if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.

Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves...working forty or even fifty hours on paper but effectively working fifteen hours...since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets.

When managers began trying to come up with scientific studies of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to deploy human labor, they never applied those same techniques to themselves—or if they did, the effect appears to have been the opposite of what they intended.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself.

Why is it that I always get a whole person when all I want is a pair of hands? -Henry Ford

Send meeting materials in advance

Make sure meetings have clear goals, not just agendas, and ensure the goals are met. 4.

In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.

When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. "Make something," he admonished. "Create something.

Nothing appalled Deming more than the idea of the interchangeable manager. "What is the motivation and purpose of men like this?" he would say with contempt. "Do they even know what they do anymore? What do they produce?" All they knew about was numbers, not product. All they thought about was maximum profit, not excellence of product.

If you use your mobile for work, then it's highly advisable to have a separate mobile for your personal life.

Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won't wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work.

The answer is not more hours, it's less bullshit.

The physical board had a huge psychological effect compared to anything we got from the electronic tracking tool we used at Microsoft. By attending the standup each day, team members were exposed to a sort of time-lapse photography of the flow of work across the board. Blocked work items were marked with pink tickets, and the team became much more focused on issue resolution and maintaining flow. Productivity jumped dramatically.

As the population of software developers ages, they care more about the rest of their lives. Many lament wasting their twenties locked up in an office slaving over a piece of code that failed to reach market expectations and became obsolete soon after release. Work/life

It's good business to provide a good work/life balance by never overloading your teams.

You need slack to enable continuous improvement. You need to balance demand against throughput and limit the quantity of work-in-progress to enable slack.

Put simply, excessive defects are the biggest waste in software development

Cumulative Flow Diagram

Greenhopper for Jira

The success combination in business is: Do what you do better... and: Do more of what you do...