Cory Doctorow Quotes

Location is all about the efficiency of work for me.

As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.

Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess.

… industry is at present producing as much as it did in 1929. [before the Great Depression] Ordinarily this would mean work for everybody, but since the depression, ten million dollars have been spent in modernizing these particular plants with the result that they are now using ten thousand fewer men than in 1929. Two million dollars more is to be spent shortly on further modernization, and much of the heavy work done in the past by men and skilled men, many of them, will be done by machinery. College and high school boys, who stand on a balcony somewhere and press buttons are preferred for this work today, and four men will do the work of one hundred men before long!

Being productive at work is rewarding, and feeling supported, challenged, and appreciated allows us to be our most efficient selves.

Your greatest job is shedding what you don't have to do.

I am a very organized person. I get up at 6:15 a.m., the kids get up at 6:45 a.m., and so I get up and get it in. I’m addicted to the high function. To me it’s a work thing - if you meditate, you can get so much work done. I always say to people you know how about three nights a year you get a good night sleep? You can have it every day with meditation.

I'm sure nobody wants to just work and earn money and all that stuff. I know it's difficult for people to break out of the syndrome, doing a normal job.

There are a lot of little tricks you can do to inject a bit more time into the day. Most important is limiting yourself to a 40 hour week, not working 50 hours or 60 or 70. It's just crazy. It's actually irresponsible to you and irresponsible to your family and friends. Why should your employer's profits be more important than your own family? You're not even going to get any of the profits - all you get is not losing your job. It's a very negative system.

A willing, cheerful worker, with his heart in his job, will turn out more work and more satisfactory work in 44 hours than an unwilling worker, dissatisfied with his conditions, will turn out in 54 hours. It is good business, therefore, for every employer to go as far as he possibly can in reaching a schedule agreeable to his people.

It is the busiest man who has time to spare.

If you do things by the job, you are perpetually driven: the hours are scourges. If you work by the hour, you gently sail on the stream of Time, which is always bearing you on to the haven of Pay, whether you make any effort, or not.

Work is the best method devised for killing time.

Never send a human to do a machine's job.

We have now well established the fact in our own nation that one can do more work in six days, even in five, than in seven. A run-down person is an unproductive person.

Improved productivity means less human sweat, not more.

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.

We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.

If you want to get something done, give it to a busy man.

Well the hours are good...' ... 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

Work is often the father of pleasure.

But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them. "Think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin--if he could grin at all. "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting.

It’s not about how much you sleep. It’s what you do while you’re awake.

Go Daddy is not just a job; it's a way of life. Our employees work hard, and offering great incentives is fun and productive for the company.