Unproductive Work Quotes

It's frustrating when you're not getting the job done.

Whether shall the Oxe goe, where he shall not labour?

It looked exhausting and pointless, two things that should be avoided at all costs

The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.

You cannot be in your offices every day doing nothing... and at the end of the day you expect to be paid.

For some time past I have conscious that I was wasting my own time and the public money on doing work that produces no result.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting Wall Street to be a laid-back place. I was prepared for hard work. Sadly, much of the work the new guys were asked to do and the insane hours we were expected to keep had little to do with making the bank more productive. It felt more like hazing.

Employ oneself upon trifling professional matters which others could do.

Half finished work generally proves to be labor lost.

There are a lot of silly projects out there.

The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.

Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it.

Upon this subject, the habits of our whole species fall into three great classes--useful labour, useless labour and idleness. Of these the first only is meritorious; and to it all the products of labour rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of it's just rights. The only remedy for this is to, as far as possible, drive useless labour and idleness out of existence.

I am like a blind pig when I work.

The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job - that just doesn't make any sense to me. That can't be the right answer.