29 Quotes by John Perry

You may lack will power, but that doesn't mean you can't take a lot of steps to make yourself more productive.

Nothing focuses attention like a real deadline. If you are in a field where life and death, or having a job or not having a job, depends on not missing deadlines, you need to learn to manipulate yourself to meet them; often a good way of doing this is teaming up with non-procrastinators.

The fantasy of doing a task perfectly is common with procrastinators; they set the bar for success very high. Then they are afraid to approach it. As the deadline approaches, they must set the bar lower.

Task triage is the habit of making a realistic assessment of what degree of perfection is required for a task at the point of accepting it, so one doesn't need to rely on one's habit of procrastinating to lower the bar.

Voltaire was a smart cookie.

The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two numbers together. Is there any harm in skipping all that, in letting the school boy learn multiplication sums, and in starting his more abstract reasoning at a more advanced point. Where would be the harm in letting the boy assume the truth of many propositions of the first four books of Euclid, letting him assume their truth partly by faith, partly by trial?

Hope provides comfort, and hope does not always require probability.

The emergence of China is driving fundamental change in the Asia-Pacific region. This process will provide an opportunity for Brunei Darussalam to re-position itself within the regional economies.

Task triage is the habit of making a realistic assessment of what degree of perfection is required for a task at the point of accepting it, so one doesn’t need to rely on one’s habit of procrastinating to lower the bar.