Quotes About Productivity

Workaholism is a contagious disease.

That's because offices have become interruption factories. A busy office is like a food processor—it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there.

The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don't waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.

A 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

Bezos only makes decisions in the first half of the day. If any important decision comes to him after noon, he won't make it, he'll say he's waiting until the next day. Because he knows he is cognitively there in the morning, in the best possible way. The mornings are for decisions, the afternoons are not.

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes—and it will—it'll hit that much harder.

Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

great remote workers are simply great workers. They exhibit the two key qualities, as Joel Spolsky labeled them in his "Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing":fn1 Smart, and Gets Things Done.

Cuando estás inspirado eres capaz de hacer en veinticuatro horas el trabajo de dos semanas. La inspiración es como una máquina del tiempo.

When you put off decisions, they pile up. And piles end up ignored, dealt with in haste, or thrown out. As a result, the individual problems in those piles stay unresolved. Whenever you can, swap "Let's think about it" for "Let's decide on it." Commit to making decisions. Don't wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.

if you can't let your employees work from home out of fear they'll slack off without your supervision, you're a babysitter, not a manager.

Algunas veces dejar lo que estás haciendo es la decisión adecuada, incluso si para entonces ya le has dedicado mucho esfuerzo. No insistas en malgastar un tiempo necesario en un trabajo que no lo es.

Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.

Stop saying ASAP. We get it. It's implied. Everyone wants things done as soon as they can be done.

Part of the problem is the perceived need to fill a whole day with management stuff, regardless of whether it's called for or not. All those dreaded status meetings, interruptions for estimates, and planning sessions have a curious way of adding up exactly to a manager's workweek. While monitoring output is sometimes quite important, it's rarely a forty-hour-per-week position. Ten hours maybe, but few full-time managers have the courage to limit their presence to that.

Plantéatelo así: si tuvieras que arrancar tu negocio en dos semanas, ¿qué dejarías para más tarde? Es curioso cómo una pregunta como ésta te obliga a concentrar tus energías. De pronto te das cuenta de que hay cantidad de cosas que no necesitas. Y que ahora te parece evidente lo que realmente es imprescindible.

If you still want people in the office every day, change that requirement to every afternoon instead. Then let your troops have their mornings to themselves.

Éste es el mensaje con el que todos nos deberíamos quedar. Toma el cincel y empieza a hacer algo real. Cualquier otra cosa será sencillamente una distracción.

Ironically, you'll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team. Instead of spending the entire day dealing with Urgent!!! emails and disruptive phone calls, you'll have the entire start (or end) of the day to yourself.

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid.

Hay algunas palabras que no deberían emplearse nunca en las empresas. Y no nos referimos a mierda o joder. Se trata de imprescindible, obligatorio, imposible, fácil, sencillamente, sólo y rápido. Son rayas rojas que si se cruzan crean malestar, sabotean las discusiones saludables y provocan retrasos en los proyectos.

In fact, for many, the hybrid approach is the right place to start. If you still want people in the office every day, change that requirement to every afternoon instead. Then let your troops have their mornings to themselves. You may be surprised to find out more work gets done this way.

Chat rooms are basically all-day meetings with an unknown set of participants and many different topics, all at once. They're basically virtual open offices running 24/7.

It's tempting for people to obsess over tools instead of what they're going to do with those tools.