Top 104 Unproductive Quotes & Sayings

A computer can be a useful and indispensable tool. But if we allow it to devour our time with vain, unproductive, and sometimes destructive pursuits, it becomes an entangling net.

I would dearly love to resist the temptation, if you can call it that, to worry. It's boring, it's anti-social, it's unproductive and it's depressing.

Where are we to look for the consumption required but among the unproductive labourers of Adam Smith?.

How you wake up each day and your morning routine (or lack thereof) dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life. Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days - which inevitably create a successful life - in the same way that unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre mornings generate unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre days, and ultimately a mediocre quality of life. By simply changing the way you wake up in the morning, you can transform any area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible.

Productivity = creating value and delivering it to people. All other busywork is unproductive fluff and should be minimized.

No day is wholly unproductive of good.

All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.

Currency trading is unnecessary, unproductive and totally immoral. It should be stopped.

[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure.

Historically, usury was defined as any interest whatever on an unproductive loan.Our whole banking system I have ever abhorred, I continue to abhor, and I shall die abhorring.

I write all day every day, so when I feel unproductive, it magnifies everything else.

Nothing is so unproductive as the law. It is expensive whether you win or lose.

I am saying that currency trading is unnecessary, unproductive, and immoral. It should be stopped. It should be made illegal.

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.

I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.

Objective leaders identify their unproductive mental models and tweak them for greater effectiveness.

You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

Elites play the role today that landlords played under feudalism. They levy interest and financial fees that are like a tax, to support what the classical economists called "unproductive activity."

Most meetings are too long, too dull, too unproductive - and too much a part of corporate life to be abandoned.

I'm not going to risk our precious military resources on an ineffective, unproductive mission.

Asian colleges would do well to use a broad range of criteria in selecting students and move beyond the unproductive "examination hell. "

Time spent travelling was assumed to be unproductive and a monetary value attributed to the minutes that would be saved from a speedier journey that allowed people to get from one office to another more quickly. I've always thought that that case was weak.

Without goals our efforts may be scattered and unproductive.

Worry is just imagination used in an unproductive way.

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.

Sadness can feel so unproductive.

Other people's views and troubles can be contagious. Don't sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.

The prospects are dim for a society that makes mascots out of the unproductive and condemns the productive.

If my boss knew how unproductive I am on Fridays, he wouldn't want me here either.

For quite a while I called myself a workaholic. I was proud of that label. Then one day it hit me; a workaholic is a label for an unproductive person.

Unproductive worry - like Parkinson's proverbial law - tends to expand to fill the time available.

My first two years, with Metro, were quite unproductive. Then I had a year at Columbia that was a complete disaster.

We were meant to grow. When we don't grow, we seek diversions--some harmless (if unproductive), others destructive--to fill the emptiness.

An unproductive truth is none. But there are products which cannot be weighed even in patent scales, nor brought to market.

Man is by nature restless. When left too long in one place he will inevitably grow bored, unmotivated, and unproductive.

I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.

As work weeks get longer and leisure time shrinks, people are becoming sicker, more distracted, absent, unproductive, and less innovative.

The U.S. and Iraq will work together next year to shift Iraqi resources from unproductive subsidies to productive uses that enable Iraqis to earn livelihoods.

My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.

The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines.

It is really hard for me to invest time into a relationship because I get kind of freaked out by the thought of doing something that part of my mind keeps telling me is "unproductive".

If I discover a manure which will enable me to make a piece of land produce 20 per cent more corn, I may withdraw at least a portion of my capital from the most unproductive part of my farm.

People who go to Oxford and Cambridge are often unproductive. What am I saying? This is nonsense. No, sometimes they get so competitive that, unless they're going to be Pulitzer prize-winning, they can't get off their backside.

Unproductive effort is never a good thing.

I believe welfare makes you lazy and unproductive.

When I was young, all I wanted to do was go to nightclubs, drink, have fun and be unproductive.

During the times we think we’re being “unproductive,” the seeds of new worlds are germinating within us, and they need peace to grow.

I've seen guys sit the whole day doing nothing, and I hate it when people are unproductive. I don't like a guy who sits on the couch all day.

Simplicity is the law of Nature for man as well as for flowers. When the tapestry (corolla) of the nuptial bed (calyx) is excessive, luxuriant, it is unproductive. The fertile flowers are single, not double.

Humor is an excellent method of keeping a tight rein on unproductive displays of emotion.

With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.

It's strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we're sleeping, we're vulnerable - and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive.

As a rule, panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

Human nature demands recognition. Without it, people lose their sense of purpose and become dissatisfied, restless, and unproductive.

I don't want to do something unproductive with my time, so I decided to do something musical. So it felt good to say, 'Yeah, I'm producing.' It gave me a fresh vibe - inspiring in a different way.

It is always a sign of an unproductive time when it concerns itself with petty and technical aspects [in philology], and likewiseit is a sign of an unproductive person to pursue such trifles.

This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.

The older, thinner, and less productive grass lands, however, frequently can be made to produce much larger yields of feed in corn than if left, as they are, in unproductive grass.

Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.