Quotes About Productivity

You get to decide where your time goes. You can either spend it moving forward, or you can spend it putting out fires. You decide. And if you don't decide, others will decide for you.

Each of us has a finite reservoir of energy in any given day. Whatever amount of energy we spend obsessing about missteps we have made, decisions that do not go our way or the belief we have been treated unfairly is energy no longer available to add value in the world.

It's not possible to move from one activity to the next at blinding speed and be reflective at the same time. The more complex and demanding the work we do, the wider, deeper and longer the perspective we require to do it well. It's almost impossible to do that when we create no white space in our lives.

While working on The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci regularly took off from painting for several hours at a time and seemed to be daydreaming aimlessly. Urged by his patron, the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, to work more continuously, da Vinci is reported to have replied, immodestly but accurately, 'The greatest geniuses accomplish more when they work less.

In another study, chronic procrastinators who set a specific time to complete a task were eight times as likely to follow through.

It's not how much time we invest into our work that determines our productivity but rather the value we produce during the hours we work.

Commuting can take a huge toll on people's productivity draining their energy during the early-morning hours, when they might otherwise be most effective. Organizations serve their employees and themselves by allowing employees to commute in off-hours or work from home.

The first key shift is to stop evaluating performance by the number of hours employees put in and instead measure it by the value they produce. That means not just permitting intermittent renewal but actively encouraging it as a key to sustainable high performance. It also means treating employees like adults by giving them freedom to decide how best to get their work done and holding them accountable for their results, not the hours they work.

It's that human beings operate most productively in the same one-dimensional way computers do: continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time, running multiple programs at the same time.

The vast majority of organizations fail to make the connection between the degree to which they meet their employees' needs and how effectively those employees perform.

Do you think your people perform better when they're healthier and happier?" Almost invariably, the answer is "Yes." Then we ask one more question: "Does your organization regularly invest in people's health and happiness?" The answer is nearly always "No.

All my movies, like Revenge, are under two hours.

As some scientists believe, then a new intelligent life form will have been created. It will be able to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for no pay, easily doing the work that 2 to 3 humans did before. Think about what that situation will mean to an employer.

I often write either really early in the morning, or really late at night.

People don't say "Work is money." They say "Time is money." We all instinctively understand this, but we also know deep down that there is something wrong with it.

When a group of intelligent people come together to talk about issues that matter, it is both natural and productive for disagreement to occur. Resolving those issues is what makes a meeting productive, engaging, even fun.

No action, activity, or process is more central to a healthy organization than the meeting.

a leader's first priority is to create an environment where others can do these things and that cannot happen if they are not having effective meetings.

The healthier an organization is, the more of its intelligence it is able to tap into and use.

And we have to stop focusing on agendas and minutes and rules, and accept the fact that bad meetings start with the attitudes and approaches of the people who lead and take part in them.

Weekly Tactical meeting should last between forty-five and ninety minutes, depending on its frequency, and should include a few critical elements, including the following:

Adrenaline addiction The unwillingness or inability of busy people to slow down and review, reflect, assess, and discuss their business and their team. An adrenaline addiction is marked by anxiety among people who always have a need to keep moving, keep spinning, even in the midst of obvious confusion and declining productivity

To make our meetings more effective, we need to have multiple types of meetings, and clearly distinguish between the various purposes, formats, and timing of those meetings.

The lack of conflict is precisely the cause of one of the biggest problems that meetings have: they are boring