Quotes About Productivity

Set a timer on your phone for twenty-five minutes.

The highest, most satisfying experiences in people's lives were when they were in flow.

all of us experience the day in three stages—a peak, a trough, and a rebound. And about three-quarters of us (larks and third birds) experience it in that order. But about one in four people, those whose genes or age make them night owls, experience the day in something closer to the reverse order—recovery, trough, peak.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (2010) By Laura Vanderkam

In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge—that is, the urge to master something new and engaging—was the best predictor of productivity. Scientists motivated by this intrinsic desire filed significantly more patents than those whose main motivation was money, even controlling for the amount of effort each group expended.

She has found that the single greatest motivator is "making progress in one's work." The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged. By creating conditions for people to make progress, shining a light on that progress, recognizing and celebrating progress, organizations can help their own cause and enrich people's lives.

I don't care where you think your resources are going. If you know, show me the measurements. If you don't, stop wasting my time.

Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don't waste time on decisions that don't matter, or more accurately, when we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy.

That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.

Recall that being organized and conscientious are predictive of a number of positive outcomes, even decades later, such as longevity, overall health, and job performance.

The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.

We all want to believe that we can do many things at once and that our attention is infinite, but this is a persistent myth.

Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.

Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, immune function, and mood regulation. Even a mild sleep reduction or a departure from a set sleep routine (for example, going to bed late one night, sleeping in the next morning) can produce detrimental effects on cognitive performance for many days afterward.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.

it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.

The law (of least effort) asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Equipping a girl with even rudimentary ICT skills can make a difference in her productivity when she grows up, and this is especially true in developing regions and even in jobs that are viewed as 'low-tech.'

I have my own set of friends with whom I discuss better story ideas, views and scripts. So I channelize my time in a productive way.

Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on specialization: on letting people concentrate on what they do best and trade with others who specialize in other things.

Even when I was working at The Village Voice, I only put in about 20 hours at the office.