 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As consultants who have a serious concern about productivity, sometimes we like to look at the lighter side. So we've gathered some quotes about getting more done that are humourous, insightful or just plain to the point.
Planning Ahead
Goal Setting
Making a Major Life Decision
Maintaining Persistence
Overcoming Procrastination
Delegating
Handling Walk-in Visitors
Running Meetings
Mastering Technology
Phone Effectiveness
Travelling
Getting Rid of Clutter
Achieving Balance
Punctuality
Saying No
The Value of Time
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
