PLANNING
AHEAD
In reality, killing time is only the name for
another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.
- Sir Osbert Sitwell
It's not enough to be busy. The question is: What are we busy about?
- Henry David Thoreau
Even if you are on the right track - you'll get run over if you
just sit there.
- Arthur Godfrey
In New York, people are very overbooked.You say, "When do you
want to have dinner?" It's May. They say, "What about
October?" And then they complain: "Oh you can't believe
how booked up I am."
- Fran Lebowitz
It is those who make the worst use of their time who most complain
of its shortness.
- Jean de la Bruyere
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GOAL SETTING
The pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy; the pursuit
of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and a terrible waste of
time.
- Anonymous
While we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable.
- Robert Ardrey
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what
they sought.
- Matsuo Basho, 16th century Japanese poet
The secret to success is constancy to purpose.
- Benjamin Disraeli
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MAKING A MAJOR
LIFE DECISION
One never rises so high as when one does not know where one is going.
- Oliver Cromwell
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has
been, is moving to become better.
- John Dewey
Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest
tragedy a man may have.
- Arthur E. Morgan
Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.
- Washington Irving
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MAINTAINING PERSISTENCE
There is no failure except in no longer trying.
There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable
barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.
- Kin Hubbard
Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied
by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce
a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
- Sydney Harris
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is, that one often
comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
- Henry Ward Beecher
We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.
- Christian Nestell Bovee
No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand
years.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Success is getting up one more time than you fall down.
- Anonymous
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every
time we fail.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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OVERCOMING PROCRASTINATION
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with
yesterday.
- Don Marquis
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
-Anonymous
Hard work is often the easy work you did not do at the proper time.
- Bernard Meltzer
Never put off till tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow
just as well.
- Mark Twain
Old procrastinators never die; they just keep putting it off.
-Anonymous
Waiting is a trap. There will always be reasons to wait...The truth
is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results, and
reasons simply don't count.
- Robert Anthony
Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.
- Benjamin Franklin
Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those
who hustle.
- Abraham Lincoln
Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard
one makes it impossible.
- George H. Lonmer
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just
sit there.
- Will Rogers
In delay there lies no plenty.
- William Shakespeare
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DELEGATING
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position
of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter;
second, telling other people to do so.
- Bertrand Russell
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good
men to do what he wants done and self-restraint enough to keep from
meddling with them while they do it.
- Theodore Roosevelt
A good manager knows that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
A great manager can convince the cat that it is necessary.
- Gene Perret
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they
well surprise you with their ingenuity.
- General George Patton
Good supervision is the art of getting average people to do superior
work.
- Anonymous
In order for me to look good, everybody around me has to look good.
- Doris Drury - Chair, Federal Reserve Bank, Kansas City,
1984
First and foremost as a manager or supervisor...your job is to get
things done through other people...You are paid to manage, not perform
every task.
- Mary Ann Allison, VP Citicorp, 1984
Hire the best. Pay them fairly. Communicate frequently. Provide
challenges and rewards. Believe in them. Get out of their way---they'll
knock your socks off.
- Mary Ann Allison in "Managing Up, Managing Down"
Delegation is giving people things to do. Management is accomplishing
organizational goals by working through individuals and groups.
It is easy to see that the two are closely entwined. And it is obvious
that the manager who is not delegating is not managing.
- Robert Maddux
Never put off a task until tomorrow if you can delegate it today.
- Helen Reynolds
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HANDLING WALK-IN
VISITORS
According to a recent issue of Psychology Today,
research shows that a slight protrusion of your tongue between your
lips, while you're working, is taken as a tacit "Do Not Disturb"
sign by most people. The next time you're trying to complete a file
on an impossible task, you might want to try this technique.
- Canadian Lawyer magazine
The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you
must say something or bust.
- Josh Billings
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native
metal of man is tested.
- James Russell Lowell
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RUNNING MEETINGS
Perhaps Hell is nothing more than an enormous
conference of those who, with little or nothing to say, take an
eternity to say it.
- Dudley C. Stone
A good sign that either the meeting or some of the people are superfluous
is when they try to get out of coming.
- Robert Heller
We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.
- Benjamin Franklin
Hardly anyone writes because you can't really write
down all you know. And even if you do write, nobody will read it.
So there are meetings, and meetings about meetings, and meetings
to plan reports, and meetings to review the status of reports. And
what these meetings are about is people just trying to figure out
what they are doing.
- Paul Strassmann, former Vice President, Xerox
When the result of a meeting is to schedule more meetings, it usually
signals trouble.
- Kevin Murphy, Management writer
In order to speak short on any subject, think long.
- Hugh Henry Brackenridge
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MASTERING TECHNOLOGY
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded
if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time
with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
- Jeff Raskin
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men,
but that men will begin to think like computers.
- Sydney J. Harris
PROGRAM (pro'-gram) n. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing
it to turn one's input into error messages. v. To engage in a pastime
similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities
for reward.
- Anonymous
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of
the future is that man may become robots.
- Erich Fromm
E-mail advocates love to push the benefits of direct communication.
Managers send and receive messages on a one-to-one basis. Now that
secretaries don't fix their sloppy writing, the whole world wonders
how they passed English 1A.
- David Buerger
...heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing
results - largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize
old ways of doing business...Instead of embedding outdated processes
in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.
- Michael Hammer, Harvard Business Review, July, 1990
The workers of the world will soon be divided into two distinct
groups. Those who will control computers and those who will be controlled
by computers. It would be best for you to be in the former group.
- Lewis Eigen, 1961
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PHONE EFFECTIVENESS
I have never been able to understand why it is that
just because I am unintelligible nobody understands me.
- Milton Mayer
"Telephone: An invention of the devil which abrogates some
of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance."
- Ambrose Bierce
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TRAVELLING
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits
are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break
up traffic jams.
- Mary Ellen Kelly
Modern man thinks he loses something-time- when he does not do things
quickly, yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains
except to kill it.
- Eric Fromm
A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be
photographed standing in front of his car.
- Emile Ganst
Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark
terror.
- Al Boliska
To me the biggest waste of time is commuting. First, there is no
place that is less than a two-hour commute from New York. You can
be half a mile outside of the city limits; you're two hours away
by car. I don't care how close they tell you it is. "Oh, it's
only thirty miles." Thirty miles? At 8:30 in the morning, thirty
miles outside New York, you might as well be starting out in Omaha.
- Fran Lebowitz
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GETTING RID OF
CLUTTER
For over a half century now I've watched office
obesity develop into a full-blown, crippling disease. As our office
clutter mounts, we're ever more intimidated and frustrated by it.
We engineer drainage and removal of water and liquid wastes from
society to prevent hazardous buildup, but the effluent that pours
into our offices-paper-is never flushed out.
- Don Aslett
Sign on cluttered desk: A clean desk may show efficiency, neatness
and organization, but very seldom provides a worthwhile surprise.
- Charles Averson
Our two greatest problems are gravity and paperwork. We can lick
gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
- Dr. Wernher Von Braun
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ACHIEVING BALANCE
Do not take life too seriously. You will never
get out of it alive.
- Elbert Hubbard
By all means, let us simplify the means of controlling time and
the myriad details of our lives, but let us vigorously preserve
our responsibility to direct our lives toward human accomplishment,
rather than the pure accumulation of information.
- Paul Rice, Timesource
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SAYING NO
I really cannot give you the formula for success.
But I can give you the formula for failure. It's this: Try to please
everyone.
- Bernard Meltzer
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PUNCTUALITY
Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment
is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's
money as his time.
- Horace Mann
I could never think well of a man's intellectual or moral character,
if he was habitually unfaithful to his appointments.
- Nathaniel Emmons
If you're there before it's over, you're on time.
- James J. Walker
Punctuality is disappointing if no one is there to appreciate it.
- Anonymous
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THE VALUE OF
TIME
The Ignisecond, n.: The overlapping moment of
time when the hand is locking the car door even as the brain is
saying, "my keys are in there!"
- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time
to make it shorter.
- Blaise Pascal
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
- Steven Wright
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
- Douglas Adams
In the first round of work simplification...you can reasonably expect
a 30 to 50 percent reduction...To implement the actual simplification,
you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will
find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason.
Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains
it, and nothing practical ordains it.
- Andrew S. Grove - CEO Intel Corp
Time is like money, the less we have of it to spare the further
we make it go.
- Josh Billings
Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for
a woman of 30.
- Robert Frost
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what
to do with it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Lost time is never found again.
- John H. Aughey
Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all
our possessions.
- John Randolph
These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times
are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nanosecond [n] The shortest possible measure of time, discovered
recently in New York city. Generally speaking, it is the time between
when the traffic light turns green and the guy behind you honks
his horn.
- Anonymous
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