Productivity At Work Quotes & Sayings

Nobody thinks of using improvements in technology and productivity to allow people to work less and require fewer assets to achieve the same standard of living. Instead, while everybody is richer, at least in terms of stuff, no one is any wealthier. Their wealth is "safely" out of reach. If it weren't, how many would still show up for work the next day? — Jacob Lund Fisker

It doesn't seem possible, but this is the number-one fact about work that new hires do not seem to understand. So let me repeat it: People are not paid because they finished school. They are not paid because they got through the job application process. They are not paid simply because they now enjoy a new job title. They are not paid so that the firm can enjoy the privilege of their presence. People are not paid for any of these reasons, or at least they are not paid for any of these reasons for very long. They are paid for only one reason: to make the firm more productive than it would be in their absence. Moreover, if workers hope to keep their position and improve it, their contribution to the productivity of the firm must exceed the resources that the firm is putting into them. — Jeffrey Tucker

First, when we are busy, we naturally believe that we are achieving. But busyness does not equal productivity. Activity is not necessarily accomplishment. Second, prioritizing requires leaders to continually think ahead, to know what's important, to know what's next, to see how everything relates to the overall vision. That's hard work. Third, prioritizing causes us to do things that are at the least uncomfortable and sometimes downright painful. — John C. Maxwell

The fact is that your productivity begins to decline after eight or nine hours of work. For this reason, working long hours into the night, although it is sometimes necessary, means that you are usually producing less and less in more and more time. The more tired you become, the worse the quality of your work will be and the more mistakes you will make. At a certain point, you can reach "the wall" and simply be unable to continue, like a battery that is run down. — Brian Tracy

I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic - to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person. — David Graeber

Saying that programmers should just accomplish twice as much doesn't work. They can gain skills and effectiveness, but they cannot get more done on demand. More time at the desk does not equal increased productivity for creative work. — Kent Beck

A work-only zone does wonders for your productivity. So, I prefer working at the office now. I spend 8 focused hours there, then I go home to be present with my family. — Derek Sivers

But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours
that's another matter. — H.G.Wells

The more government takes in taxes, the less incentive people have to work. What coal miner or assembly-line worker jumps at the offer of overtime when he knows Uncle Sam is going to take sixty percent or more of his extra pay? ... Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong. If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they'll be more industrious; they'll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all - and more revenue for government.4 — Donald J. Trump

The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don't have to work hard. — Jack Welch

Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen. — David Allen

Through private investment capitalism kept raising the productivity of labor to new heights. Parents were able to earn enough so their offspring did not have to join the work force at an early age. This produced something unique in history: Childhood, a time when the young could experience the innocence of play and opportunity of schooling before entering the world of work. — Richard Ebeling

The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions
showing up at work, paying the bills
you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge sadness in ourselves or those close to us
better known these days as denial, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Our first-party devices will light up digital work and life. Surface Pro 3 is a great example
it is the world's best productivity tablet. In addition, we will build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem. That means at times we'll develop new categories like we did with Surface. It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition. — Satya Nadella

At work, conversation increases productivity. And yet people go into work, put on their headphones. In one interview, somebody called it - they become pilots in their own cockpits. — Judy Woodruff

We organize many of our most important institutions - our schools and our workplaces - tells a very different story. It's the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink - a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they'll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. — Susan Cain

The physical board had a huge psychological effect compared to anything we got from the electronic tracking tool we used at Microsoft. By attending the standup each day, team members were exposed to a sort of time-lapse photography of the flow of work across the board. Blocked work items were marked with pink tickets, and the team became much more focused on issue resolution and maintaining flow. Productivity jumped dramatically. — David J. Anderson

Increase Your Productivity We live in a demanding and distracting world. Being productive can sometimes feel like an impossible feat. Here are three ways to get more done without burning out: Keep one to-do list. Include everything you want or need to do in one place. Writing it down helps get it off your mind and leaves you free to focus on the task at hand. Do the most important thing first. Before you leave work in the evening, decide what one thing you need to accomplish the next day. Do it first thing in the morning, when you're likely to have the most energy and fewest distractions. Schedule time for non-urgent things. It's easy to get caught up in the pressing issues of the day. Block off time in your calendar to do things that would otherwise get squeezed out, like writing, thinking creatively, or building relationships. — Anonymous

There has not been a piece of technology designed to save labor that has not increased labor. Word processors allow you to do what your secretary used to do for you. The Internet, BlackBerries, iPhones, yes they keep you tethered, but that's not the main problem. It's that along with increasing personal productivity, they increase the expectation of productivity. It no longer becomes a bonus to do the work of one and a half men, but the norm. And then when everyone's working at one hundred and fifty percent capacity, they can fire a third of the workforce and still maintain output. — Wayne Gladstone

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today. — Peter Thiel

The connection between health and productivity at work is intuitively obvious but has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of either researchers or corporate financial officers. Ronald Kessler and Paul Stang help to bridge the usual gap between research and the marketplace with the help of a top-notch group of the best 'real-world' investigators obtainable-all in the cause of making the case that employee health should be treated as an investment in business performance-thus creating the new discipline of health and productivity management. — Sean Sullivan

Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanisation, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labour necessary in the manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. — The Invisible Committee

... In a ROWE* people don't have schedules.
They show up when they want.
They don't have to be in the office at certain time, or anytime.
They just have to get their work done.

How they do it ?
When they do it ?
Where they do it ?
It's totally up to them.

Meetings & this kind of environments are Optional.


What happens ... ?

Almost across the board !
- Productivity goes up
- Worker Engagement goes up
- Worker Satisfaction goes up
- Turnovers goes down


- Autonomy .. Mastery .. Purpose -
these are the building blocks of new way of doing things."


*ROWE: results-only work environment — Daniel H. Pink

Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They're just more engaged at work. — Tom Rath

On feeling guilty about lack of 'productivity':
"In a time of infirmity, the illness IS one's work. Taking care of all the disciplines that our health problems require IS the other part of the small daily fidelity to which we are called, beside the faithfulness of being attentive to God. We can be well simply by our diligence in being who we are at the moment."
Marva Dawn, Being Well When We're Ill pg 137 — Marva J. Dawn

When your livelihood depends on self-imposed productivity, you either get good at it or you find yourself in mounds of debt. — Nacie Carson

Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive."10 This is a curious notion of productivity - at once overtly political and yet presented innocently enough, as if there were only one possible meaning of "productivity." This perspective on life incorporates the Protestant work ethic (that "productivity" is what makes an animal "effective") and echoes the Old Testament notion that life must be endured, not enjoyed. These assumptions are embedded throughout the literature of evolutionary psychology. Ethologist/primatologist Frans de Waal, one of the more open-minded philosophers of human nature, calls this Calvinist sociobiology. — Christopher Ryan

YEARS AGO I WORKED ON A GOVERNMENT TASK force studying fatherhood and healthy families. As we met in DC, I learned one of the main causes of the breakdown of the American family was the Industrial Revolution. When men left their homes and farms to work on assembly lines, they disconnected their sense of worth from the well-being of their wives and children and began to associate it with efficiency and productivity in manufacturing. While the Industrial Revolution served the world in terrific ways, it was also a mild tragedy in our social evolution. Raising healthy children became a woman's job. Food was no longer grown in the backyard, it was bought at a store with money earned from the necessary separation of the father. Within a few generations, then, intimacy in family relationships began to be monopolized by females. — Donald Miller

even when women can imagine changes that might increase their productivity at work, their happiness at home, or their overall contentment with their lives, their suppressed sense of entitlement creates real barriers to their asking. Because they're not dissatisfied with what they have and not sure they deserve more, women often settle for less. — Linda Babcock

Each of these imperatives has a tendency to degenerate into an excuse for greed and materialism in the absence of the other. Without the call to generosity, the call to productivity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives - as long as they accumulate their wealth by working productively. But without the call to productivity, the call to generosity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives - as long as they pay off God by tithing their 10 percent. The only way to root out materialism is to reorient people's attitudes about their entire economic lives. If you only lead people to do good work (productivity), they'll use their wealth selfishly. If you only lead them to get their use of wealth right (generosity), they won't orient their lives to good work. The whole life of a person has to turn away from selfishness and serve God and neighbor. As someone once said, the only effective place to intervene in a vicious circle is everywhere at once. — Greg Forster