Quotes About Productivity

now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book?

Work left undone for years affects people's moods, their feelings about themselves, their ability to work creatively, and their hopes for the future.

Technological progress fostered industrial capitalism, but would eventually undermine it. Labor productivity in manufacturing industries rose much faster than in the rest of the economy. That meant that the same or higher quantity of steel, cars, and electronics could be produced with many fewer workers. Manufacturing's share of total employment began to decline steadily in all the advanced industrial countries sometime after the Second World War.

Developing sound policies requires seeing natural resources as dividends of sustained ecosystem productivity rather than as a stockpile of assets.

Waber has also overseen interventions in company cafeterias: Merely replacing four-person tables with ten-person tables has boosted productivity by 10 percent. The lesson of all these studies is the same: Create spaces that maximize collisions.

One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster.)

People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.

decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day

elite performers have something in common: They're really good at taking breaks

High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.

coffee, followed by a nap of ten to twenty minutes, is the ideal technique

Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign of strength

So get rid of the unnecessary obligations, time-wasting distractions, and useless burdens that stand in your way.

Rewards do not undermine people's intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.

start planning how to achieve those top five goals. And the other twenty? Get rid of them.

frequent short breaks are more effective than occasional ones

E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss, according to research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist who is now a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.1

99 percent of us cannot multitask.

Management isn't about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices

Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person's longer-term motivation to continue the project.

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model," Ressler told me. "No matter what kind of business you're in, it's time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.

maybe those decisions were bad because he made them in the afternoon

The Power of Breaks, the Promise of Lunch, and the Case for a Modern Siesta

the more they chat and gossip—the more they get done