Quotes About Productivity

Pass on hiring people you don't need, even if you think that person's a great catch.

Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a delegator's best friend. That's where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile, everyone else who attends is pulled away from getting real work done.

Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

Don't throw good time after bad work.

The longer something takes, the less likely it is that you're going to finish it.

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can't be found. Instead, it's just one interruption after another.

you'd be amazed how much quality collective thought can be captured using two simple tools: a voice connection and a shared screen.

It's time for companies to stop asking their employees to breathlessly chase ever-higher, ever-more-artificial targets set by ego.

Modern-day offices have become interruption factories. Merely walking in the door makes you a target for anyone else's conversation, question, or irritation. When you're on the inside, you're a resource who can be polled, interrogated, or pulled into a meeting. And another meeting about that other meeting. How can you expect anyone to get work done in an environment like that?

We don't throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three

An owner unknowingly scattering people's attention is a common cause of the question "Why's everyone working so much but nothing's getting done?

soon you'll see that it's the work—not the clock—that matters.

Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF.

Chaos should not be the natural state at work.

Management scholar Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago when he said "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Commuting isn't just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment—it's bad for business. And it doesn't have to be that way.

Meetings should be great—they're opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.

The only way to get more done is to have less to do.

great work ethic isn't about working whenever you're called upon. It's about doing what you say you're going to do, putting in a fair day's work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

If the boss is constantly pulling people off one project to chase another, nobody's going to get anything done.

But the thing is, there's not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there's hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it.

If you spend 20 percent each on getting five things to 80 percent, well, then, you've done five things!

As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: "To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision."fn3

If you're pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn't be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!