Bruce Schneier Quotes

For a person to become deeply involved in any activity it is essential that he knows precisely what tasks he must accomplish, moment by moment.

The military taught me the importance of getting something done in a timely manner and the importance of completing a mission on time. My lieutenant would say, 'If you don't, you die.' In many ways, life is the same. If you don't pay attention to a timeline, you lose out on the ability to accomplish the task at hand.

There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.

One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.

What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.

Okay. Look, why don't you take care of the half a million things you've been letting dangle in Roarke's Empire of Everything?" "Catchy title. I may use it one day.

Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.

I don't want to talk about nonsense because it doesn't help me.

I never have time to cook, so I just look through the books and imagine the dishes I would make if I wasn't going out for a business dinner.

I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.

We become so caught up in the busyness of our lives. Were we to step back, however, and take a good look at what we’re doing, we may find that we have immersed ourselves in the “thick of thin things.” In other words, too often we spend most of our time taking care of the things which do not really matter much at all in the grand scheme of things, neglecting those more important causes.

Look at those two. Wasting time. You wouldn't catch me doing that.

There is no remedy for time misspent; No healing for the waste of idleness, Whose very languor is a punishment Heavier than active souls can feel or guess.

You don't look at it as the size of the role. Quantity is not the point. You can be as thorough in 30 seconds as you can in three hours.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.

To beguile the time, look like the time.

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

I'm not one of these people who says, 'I don't watch TV much.' Or looks down their nose at TV and they watch it for 20, 30 hours a week. I'm so busy. I work seven days a week that I just don't watch TV.

Any of us probably could do more important things than we are doing. Any of us could use some changes in our tasks. But none of us - and still stay alive and sane - could do without something to do.

Now public business takes up so much of my time that I must get time a Sundays or a nights to look after my own matters.

Waste of time is the most extravagant and costly of all expenses.

Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you.

My schedule, it always looks like it's really steady, but believe it or not, I tend to work a bunch and then take a year off.

Time is passing, ... We have to look at the reality of the situation and ... redouble our efforts and get on with it.