Quotes About Optimization

We lose all that time which we might employ better.

There is no such thing as time management. There is only the mindset that optimally manages the self and its actions.

Saving time is one of the great superpowers you can unlock in the modern era.

Take decision each single time to ascertain that you are getting the best every time.

I came across a NATO symposium on Human Performance Optimization that included a roundup of medical technologies that might be repurposed to optimize warfighters. In among the prosthetic limbs "to provide superhuman strength" and the infrared and ultraviolet vision–bestowing eye implants was this: corpus callosotomy to "allow unihemispheric sleep and continuous alertness.

What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.

Pareto Principle—80 percent of the results flow out of 20 percent of the activities.

A menudo «lo bueno» es enemigo de «lo mejor».

Effectiveness lies in the balance—what I call the P/PC Balance. P stands for production of desired results, the golden eggs. PC stands for production capability, the ability or asset that produces the golden eggs.

In time management jargon, this is called the Pareto Principle—80 percent of the results flow out of 20 percent of the activities.

One indication that a routine needs to be broken out of another routine is deep nesting of an inner loop or a conditional. Reduce the containing routine's complexity by pulling the nested part out and putting it into its own routine.

Classes and routines are first and foremost intellectual tools for reducing complexity. If they're not making your job simpler, they're not doing their jobs.

in the vast majority of systems, efficiency isn't critical.

Eighty percent of the errors are found in 20 percent of a project's classes or routines

Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide.

How do you minimize product duplication?" or "How do you rationalize product investments on a global basis?

Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

smarter people tend to think more like economists

Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of good.

A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.