James Surowiecki Quotes

Mostly I make lists for projects. This can be daunting. Breaking something big into its constituent parts will help you organize your thoughts, but it can also force you to confront the depth of your ignorance and the hugeness of the task. That's OK. The project may be the lion, but the list is your whip.

A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That's an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive.

Organize and execute around priorities.

You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.

Simplify the task. Continually look for faster, better, easier ways to get the job done.

To-Do lists help us break life into small steps.

I'm the ultimate organizer! My major at Stanford was "Organizational Behavior" so I love to multi-task and stay extra busy.

Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.

The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.

The better organized you are in the simple things, the more spontaneous and free you can be in the ore important things.

I do everything via email. Which in turn works as my tickler file and prioritization queue. I start at the top every morning and keep on going until I'm finished. I don't do calls. I don't do meetings.

Dispatch is the soul of business.

Have a time and place for everything, and do everything in its time and place, and you will not only accomplish more, but have far more leisure than those who are always hurrying.

If you don't plan your time, someone else will help you waste it.

The checklist is one of the most high powered productivity tool ever discovered.

I balance it all by being extremely organized, and I am a very efficient delegator.

You can get control of your tasks and activities only to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few activities that can really make a difference in your life.

I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves. I am very sure, that many people lose two or three hours every day, by not taking care of the minutes.

You must plan your work and then work your plan.

Everything in life is a checklist, whether it's building a birdhouse or building a kitchen. If you don't have a checklist, you're much more likely to forget something.

We must improve our time; time goes with rapid foot.

One of the secrets of getting more done is to make a TO DO List every day, keep it visible, and use it as a guide to action as you go through the day.

You do the things that need to be done according to priority.

The fact is that you can't do everything that you have to do. You have to procrastinate on something. Therefore, procrastinate on small tasks.

I'm extremely organized. The more things I have to work on and can bounce back and forth between, the more energized I am.