Task Efficiency Quotes

Making more sense out of my data, my needs, my tasks - to me, that's the future of Office.

I finished my dissertation six weeks early. Who does that? As soon as something comes in, I like it to go out.

Stay focused and don't try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.

The start of the day is often the best time to get things done. This is somewhat related to willpower.

There's no record that you done heard me produce that I spent more than ten minutes on.

I don't think I'm better than everyone else at anything, but I am very quick at organizing a big mass of interview tape into a structure.

A workman who wants to do his work well must first prepare his tools.

If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ... [J]ust a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.

If you want to cut down a tree, it is no use to climb into its branches.

The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.

You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.

I am a great believer in the OHIO principle: Only handle it once. When you read an e-mail, decide whether or not to reply to it, and, if you need to reply, do so right then and there. I have found that about 80 percent of all e-mails, whether internal or external, do not require a response.

When I first reviewed the iPad, I wrote that, to succeed, 'It will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative.'

...more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

You need a screwdriver for screws and a hammer for nails. Anybody that's trying to screw in a nail with a screwdriver… that ain't too smart.

If you know what you're doing, you can make a meal happen with any kitchen knife. But using a top-quality knife versus a low-quality one is the difference between driving a Jaguar and a VW Jetta across the country. They'll both get you there. But the Jaguar will give you a much smoother ride.

I used Evernote almost exclusively for researching 'The 4-Hour Body.' I was able to eliminate all of the perpetually open tabs and multiple bookmarking services. It's also all automatically backed up to Evernote, which gives me peace of mind.

If a man does not work at necessary and good things, then he will work at unnecessary and stupid things

Motivation is undoubtedly the single greatest influence on how well people perform. Most productivity studies have found that motivation has a stronger influence on productivity than any other factor.

Do you know how much faster I can fix an airplane when I want to fix it than when I don't want to fix it?

It's most useful to think about not jobs but tasks. And within any given job, there are lots of different tasks. If you're a radiologist maybe reading the images machines can be able to do that better, maybe making the broader diagnosis and communicating it to the patients.

When you multitask, you believe you're being exceptionally productive, but really, you're fooling yourself. Each time you switch tasks, you have to backtrack a little and remind yourself where you are in the process and what's next. Invariably. you are spending twice as much time on parts of the task.

There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.

I like multi-tasking.