Quotes About Productivity

It's so easy to say yes. Yes to another feature, yes to an overly optimistic deadline, yes to a mediocre design. Soon, the stack of things you've said yes to grows so tall you can't even see the things you should really be doing. Start getting into the habit of saying no—even to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.

If you decide you absolutely must get together, try to make your meeting a productive one by sticking to these simple rules: Set a timer. When it rings, meeting's over. Period. Invite as few people as possible. Always have a clear agenda. Begin with a specific problem. Meet at the site of the problem instead of a conference room. Point to real things and suggest real changes. End with a solution and make someone responsible for implementing it.

You shouldn't expect the job to be someone's entire life—at least not if you want to keep them around for a long time.

Cut your ambition in half. You're better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.

The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make

HP's Telework Calculator‡ shows a savings of almost $10,000 per year for an SUV driver who spends an hour a day commuting ten miles round trip.

Pass on hiring people you don't need, even if you think that person's a great catch. You'll be doing your company more harm than good if you bring in talented people who have nothing important to do.

If you work on A, can you still do B and C before April? If not, would you rather have B and C instead of A? If you're stuck on something for a long period of time, that means there are other things you're not getting done.

If you're constantly staying late and working weekends, it's not because there's too much work to be done. It's because you're not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.

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.

The way you build momentum is by getting something done and then moving on to the next thing. No one likes to be stuck on an endless project with no finish line in sight.

The solution: Break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller it is, the easier it is to estimate. You're probably still going to get it wrong, but you'll be a lot less wrong than if you estimated a big project. If something takes twice as long as you expected, better to have it be a small project that's a couple weeks over rather than a long one that's a couple months over. Keep breaking your time frames down into

What distinguishes people who are ten times more effective than the norm is not that they work ten times as hard; it's that they use their creativity to come up with solutions that require one-tenth of the effort.

Instead of watching TV or playing World of Warcraft, work on your idea. Instead of going to bed at ten, go to bed at eleven. We're not talking about all-nighters or sixteen-hour days—we're talking about squeezing out a few extra hours a week. That's enough time to get something going.

In reality, it's overwork, not underwork, that's the real enemy in a successful remote-working environment.

With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate work. Everyone's got to be producing. No one can be above the work.

Most people suffering from a lack of motivation will blame themselves first. "Ah, it's because I'm such a procrastinator!" "Why can't I just get myself together?" The truth, more often than not, is that you are not the problem; it's the world you're working in.

The company's twenty thousand workers are the best paid in the industry, but the company has the lowest labor cost per ton of steel, leads the industry in return on capital, has the lowest financial leverage of any major steel company, and has paid 142 consecutive dividends. Retaining the right people sets up the company to do lots more with less.

Hackett found that leaders at "above average" companies are surprisingly different in this critical measure. They identify an average of just twenty-one priorities instead of 372. Editing the list isn't easy, but the payoff is huge. Time and money get tightly focused on the crucial activities that drive the firm's competitive advantage, and everyone has a clearer idea what to do and no problem deciding who's accountable.

A.T. Kearney research shows that the best performing companies had five hundred fewer managers per billion dollars in sales than poorer performing organizations.

This book will help you turn difficult conversations into learning conversations by helping you handle each of the Three Conversations more productively and improving your ability to handle all three at once.

I don't need time, I need a deadline.

I don't need time. What I need is a deadline.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.