Sebastian Thrun Quotes

Has anyone ever said, 'I wish I could go to more meetings today'?

Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.

I try not to schedule too many meetings. That's one of the things I learned in corporate America - that you can spend your days having meetings and never actually have time to work.

A lot of times, people find themselves in a meeting where the primary purpose is to receive information, and that's a poor use of people's time. Those meetings can be easily dispensed with and can be an email instead that people read in their own time.

Here at work we're all just trying to get a job done. My people have the confidence of their convictions and they know their skills. And that occupies most of my time.

The most precious resource for businesspeople is not their time. It's their energy. Manage it well.

If you are working from your inbox, you are working on other people’s priorities.

When I do work, I get so much done in such a concentrated time that once I’m through a series, I’m so drained I don’t want to get near the camera.

Talking things over has its place in an organization [but] so-called conferences are being grossly overdone. One executive stops at the desk of another to tell him, perhaps, about the wonderful score he made at golf on Saturday afternoon. This chin-chin immediately becomes a conference, and neither the office boy nor the telephone operator must disturb either gentleman. More idle gossip is indulged in at many business conferences these days than an old wives' sewing circle would be guilty of.

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

I think there needs to be a meeting to set an agenda for more meetings about meetings.

I don't like having too many projects in the pipeline. I like to focus on what's at hand.

Nobody works better under pressure. They just work faster.

I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.

Our meetings are held to discuss many problems which would never arise if we held fewer meetings.

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.

We don't have meetings unless absolutely necessary.

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

It's very different - the European way of working and the American way of working. There are two sides for each of them. In Italy, or France, we take it very slow. For example, we would have a lunch break of an hour or more. Just sitting down at the table, chitchatting. In America, it's like, "Grab your sandwich, we're ready to shoot in 10 minutes." But at the same time, everything works so much better in America. It's more efficient, so it's easier to bring the results home faster.

If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

The ability to concentrate and to use your time well is everything if you want to succeed in business--or almost anywhere else for that matter.

If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.

The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody's time never watches the foreman never talks back.