Tim Ferriss Quotes

Even with a computer, I can't get rid of all the papers in my life.

When I was a postdoc, I jotted every fresh thought on a three-by-five card and kept them in a card catalogue.

Brain extenders are anything that get information out of our heads and into the physical world: calendars, key hooks by the front door, note pads, 'to do' lists.

My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up, and I'm like, 'I don't know how to back you up. Do it yourself!'

As much as we can, we want to prevent people from having to think about how to keep and share their stuff.

Oh, some day I'll tell you about why I wrote more than 1,500 Gmail filters. They throw away more than 300 emails every day. Every day. It's the best thing I ever did for my productivity.

I don't think I'm better than everyone else at anything, but I am very quick at organizing a big mass of interview tape into a structure.

I am a great believer in the OHIO principle: Only handle it once. When you read an e-mail, decide whether or not to reply to it, and, if you need to reply, do so right then and there. I have found that about 80 percent of all e-mails, whether internal or external, do not require a response.

I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.

Dropbox looks really simple to the end user and is extremely magical and just works. But under the hood, the complexity of the technology is huge. The amount of work it requires to store, scale and move this data is pretty intense.

I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.

Most computers today have built in backup software.

So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go.

I might seem biased, but I use Evernote every day. It came to me through my readers, who I'd asked for software recommendations via Twitter and Facebook. For seemingly every function, the answer was 'Man, you have to use Evernote.'

Maybe I am a bit unusual here, but I am less stressed if I have my phone with me. Because I can spend like an hour in the morning taking care of everything instead of I sit there and wonder what I missed or wonder what's happening. So it's way less stressful for me to just answer my phone.

Dropbox sweats the user experience details as commendably as it masters the considerable engineering challenges required to reliably sync files everywhere a user may need them.

I am thankful the most important key in history was invented. It's not the key to your house, your car, your boat, your safety deposit box, your bike lock or your private community. It's the key to order, sanity, and peace of mind. The key is 'Delete.'

When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.

I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.

We are bombarded on all sides by a vast number of messages we don't want or need. More information is generated in a single day than we can absorb in a lifetime. To fully enjoy life, all of us must find our own breathing space and peace of mind.

The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.

Productivity is grounded in the PC. Where does the computing power come from? How would you run 'USA Today' without PCs? Run a hospital without PCs? People don't want products, they want solutions.

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.

All of my memories are now on hard drives. I'll change phones or I'll change my laptop, and all my photos stay.

Making more sense out of my data, my needs, my tasks - to me, that's the future of Office.