Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking, and it's slow, distracting, and inefficient. It's almost a counterproductivity tool.

Email is familiar. It's comfortable. It's easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.

Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.

I refuse to this day to do e-mail because everybody I know that does it, it takes another two or three hours a day. I don't want to give two or three more hours away.

Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.

I learned not to confuse 'busy' with 'productive,' but I'm still far too addicted to email to resist its early-morning digital snuggles.

I don't read e-mails because I hate them.

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.

I think we are all coming to realize the web in all its manifestations is a sucking time hole.

It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind.

I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet - even though it sometimes ends up being not being a waste of time.

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

I'm an e-mail junkie though I'm trying to read my in-box only twice a day and to answer all at once.

I don't use the Internet, as I don't like living with lots of distractions. I have tried, but I found it a hindrance. as my sense of priorities goes out of the window and it pulls me out of my writing, particularly with email. I'd sit there for hours just replying to emails.

Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.

Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.

When I was working office jobs, I was going on Facebook all the time.

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old.

When you go on your phone to check what time it is, you get so distracted. It happens to me every day. 'Oh, I just wanted to see what time it is, but now I'm magically on a panda video.' This is the easier way, but it's also a part of your personal style. It ends up becoming a part of who you are, and representing what you love.

Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor of four; probably it is worse.

I don't get up and look at e-mail. I don't even know my e-mail address. I needed one just to have a computer put on. But I never, ever even thought of going to it. It's just not what I'm about. I just don't want to waste my life with it. It's just too much; I think people are just a little too absorbed in all of that.

E-mails are the new herpes: You never get rid of them.

Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.

When you kill a little time, you may be murdering opportunity.

Being busy does not always mean real work.