Ahead Of Schedule Quotes

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I flip ahead in the textbook. There's an interesting chapter about acid rain. Nothing about sex. We aren't scheduled to learn about that until eleventh grade.
Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)
Because that was the way surprises worked—they didn’t tend to pencil themselves in to your schedule and let you know they were visiting ahead of time.
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
Could I be having a midlife crisis? Ahead of schedule. God, I'd just turned thirty-four. How batty would I be by fourty?
Noreen Wald (Remembrance of Murders Past (A Ghostwriter Mystery, #4))
I want to try something a bit lateral,’ Holsten explained. ‘Is it likely to get us blown up ahead of schedule?’ ‘I don’t think so.
Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time (Children of Time, #1))
Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.
Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software)
Travel" Sometimes I know I love you better than all the others I kiss it’s funny but it’s true and I wouldn’t roll from one to the next so fast if you hadn’t knocked them all down like ninepins when you roared by my bed I keep trying to race ahead and catch you at the newest station or whistle stop but you are flighty about schedules and always soar away just as leaning from my taxicab my breath reaches for the back of your neck
Frank O'Hara (The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara)
Even a moment's reflection will help you see that the problem of using your time well is not a problem of the mind but of the heart. It will only yield to a change in the very way we feel about time. The value of time must change for us. And then the way we think about it will change, naturally and wisely. That change in feeling and in thinking is combined in the words of a prophet of God in this dispensation. It was Brigham Young, and the year was 1877, and he was speaking at April general conference. He wasn't talking about time or schedules or frustrations with too many demands upon us. Rather, he was trying to teach the members of the Church how to unite themselves in what was called the united order. The Saints were grappling with the question of how property should be distributed if they were to live the celestial law. In his usual direct style, he taught the people that they were having trouble finding solutions because they misunderstood the problem. Particularly, he told them they didn't understand either property or the distribution of wealth. Here is what he said: With regard to our property, as I have told you many times, the property which we inherit from our Heavenly Father is our time, and the power to choose in the disposition of the same. This is the real capital that is bequeathed unto us by our Heavenly Father; all the rest is what he may be pleased to add unto us. To direct, to counsel and to advise in the disposition of our time, pertains to our calling as God's servants, according to the wisdom which he has given and will continue to give unto us as we seek it. [JD 18:354] Time is the property we inherit from God, along with the power to choose what we will do with it. President Young calls the gift of life, which is time and the power to dispose of it, so great an inheritance that we should feel it is our capital. The early Yankee families in America taught their children and grandchildren some rules about an inheritance. They were always to invest the capital they inherited and live only on part of the earnings. One rule was "Never spend your capital." And those families had confidence the rule would be followed because of an attitude of responsibility toward those who would follow in later generations. It didn't always work, but the hope was that inherited wealth would be felt a trust so important that no descendent would put pleasure ahead of obligation to those who would follow. Now, I can see and hear Brigham Young, who was as flinty a New Englander as the Adams or the Cabots ever hoped to be, as if he were leaning over this pulpit tonight. He would say something like this, with a directness and power I wish I could approach: "Your inheritance is time. It is capital far more precious than any lands or stocks or houses you will ever get. Spend it foolishly, and you will bankrupt yourself and cheapen the inheritance of those that follow you. Invest it wisely, and you will bless generations to come. “A Child of Promise”, BYU Speeches, 4 May 1986
Henry B. Eyring
THE TEACHER WALKED into Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, at eleven a.m.—still ahead of schedule.
James Patterson (Run for Your Life (Michael Bennett, #2))
I'm running late, but there's always time to scribble weird messages in guest signage books. Also, am I really late? The Catholic Church added a thousand years to history, so I figure I'm actually way ahead of schedule.
Jarod Kintz (Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast)
It feels bad, telling you all this. Spoiling the surprise, I mean. You’ll see it all yourself, soon enough. That is, if you live too long. Or if you just give up and go nuts ahead of schedule. My mom, Eva, even you, eventually everybody gets a bracelet.
Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)
What else can you do with the law of gravitation? If we look at the moons of Jupiter we can understand everything about the way they move around that planet. Incidentally, there was once a certain difficulty with the moons of Jupiter that is worth remarking on. These satellites were studied very carefully by Rømer, who noticed that the moons sometimes seemed to be ahead of schedule, and sometimes behind. (One can find their schedules by waiting a very long time and finding out how long it takes on the average for the moons to go around.) Now they were ahead when Jupiter was particularly close to the earth and they were behind when Jupiter was farther from the earth. This would have been a very difficult thing to explain according to the law of gravitation—it would have been, in fact, the death of this wonderful theory if there were no other explanation. If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong. But the reason for this discrepancy was very simple and beautiful: it takes a little while to see the moons of Jupiter because of the time it takes light to travel from Jupiter to the earth. When Jupiter is closer to the earth the time is a little less, and when it is farther from the earth, the time is more. This is why moons appear to be, on the average, a little ahead or a little behind, depending on whether they are closer to or farther from the earth. This phenomenon showed that light does not travel instantaneously, and furnished the first estimate of the speed of light. This was done in 1676.
Richard P. Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat)
Because I knew firsthand that life could be taking you in one direction, and the next moment, you’d be going in a completely different one. Because that was the way surprises worked—they didn’t tend to pencil themselves in to your schedule and let you know they were visiting ahead of time.
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
When I traveled, I planned carefully for minimal disruption to his schedule. I arranged playdates for after school or asked my parents for help. But I couldn’t pack lunches ahead, give baths ahead, make breakfasts ahead, get the kids dressed ahead, anticipate fevers or stomach flus ahead. Some things would have to be done in real time.
Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful)
OK, but what do I do about the debt I have? While the mantra here is “avoid debt at all costs,” if you already have it, it is worth considering if paying it off ahead of schedule is the best use of your capital. In today’s environment, here’s my rough guideline: If your interest rate is... Less than 3%, pay it off slowly and route the money to your investments instead. Between 3-5%, do whatever feels most comfortable: Either put the money to debt payment or investments. More than 5%, pay it off ASAP. But this is just looking at the numbers. There is a lot to be said for focusing on just getting it out of your life and moving on. Especially if keeping your debt under control has been a problem for you.
J.L. Collins (The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life)
In order to live our values in each of these domains, we must reserve time in our schedules to do so. Only by setting aside specific time in our schedules for traction (the actions that draw us toward what we want in life) can we turn our backs on distraction. Without planning ahead, it’s impossible to tell the difference between traction and distraction.
Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
I was dissatisfied with my 1967 manuscript and decided to rewrite the book. It was the first of September, and I said to myself, “If I do not have the finished manuscript in Faber’s hands by September 10, I shall have to kill myself.” And under this threat, I started writing. Within a day or so, the feeling of threat had disappeared, and the joy of writing took over. I was no longer using drugs, but it was a time of extraordinary elation and energy. It seemed to me almost as though the book were being dictated, everything organizing itself swiftly and automatically. I would sleep for just a couple of hours a night. And a day ahead of schedule, on September 9, I took the book to Faber & Faber. Their offices were in Great Russell Street, near the British Museum, and after dropping off the manuscript, I walked over to the museum. Looking at artifacts there — pottery, sculptures, tools, and especially books and manuscripts, which had long outlived their creators — I had the feeling that I, too, had produced something. Something modest, perhaps, but with a reality and existence of its own, something that might live on after I was gone. I have never had such a strong feeling, a feeling of having made something real and of some value, as I did with that first book, which was written in the face of such threats from Friedman and, for that matter, from myself. Returning to New York, I felt a sense of joyousness and almost blessedness. I wanted to shout, “Hallelujah!” but I was too shy. Instead, I went to concerts every night — Mozart operas and Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert — feeling exuberant and alive.
Oliver Sacks
Remember to incorporate rhythms that give you time to stop and think and live intentionally. The work week already has a regular rhythm built into it. It is called the weekend. Make sure you have a weekend. Not all jobs are Monday through Friday, but make sure that you have some time off of work each week to spend time with friends and family. You may think you’re getting ahead by working extra hours, but you’re not gaining anything—you are only trading your life now for something later—something that may not materialize. If you have to work two jobs or extra hours to pay for education or just to put food on the table, you still need to make some time for rest or you will burn out. Fun is not a luxury—it clears your head so you can do better at your job when you go back to work. Therefore, make sure you schedule time for relaxation, fun, worship, and prayer.
James L. Papandrea (Spiritual Blueprint)
I start off meaning to tell you a story, and then I get sidetracked with something that interests me, and I go wandering off all over the place; yet here we are, nicely on schedule, at the point where I have just met Phaedra and am just starting off on the long process of getting betrothed to her. In fact, we are here rather ahead of time; so, while we are waiting for the main stream of my narrative to catch up with us, I shall tell you about my first meeting with the Spartans.
Tom Holt (The Walled Orchard (The Walled Orchard #1-2))
If we look at the moons of Jupiter we can understand everything about the way they move around that planet. Incidentally, there was once a certain difficulty with the moons of Jupiter that is worth remarking on. These satellites were studied very carefully by Roemer, who noticed that the moons sometimes seemed to be ahead of schedule, and sometimes behind. (One can find their schedules by waiting a very long time and finding out how long it takes on the average for the moons to go around.) Now they were ahead when Jupiter was particularly close to the earth and they were behind when Jupiter was farther from the earth. This would have been a very difficult thing to explain according to the law of gravitation—it would have been, in fact, the death of this wonderful theory if there were no other explanation. If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong. But the reason for this discrepancy was very simple and beautiful: it takes a little while to see the moons of Jupiter because of the time it takes light to travel from Jupiter to the earth. When Jupiter is closer to the earth the time is a little less, and when it is farther from the earth, the time is more. This is why moons appear to be, on the average, a little ahead or a little behind, depending on whether they are closer to or farther from the earth. This phenomenon showed that light does not travel instantaneously, and furnished the first estimate of the speed of light. This was done in 1656.
Richard P. Feynman (Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher)
else can you do with the law of gravitation? If we look at the moons of Jupiter we can understand everything about the way they move around that planet. Incidentally, there was once a certain difficulty with the moons of Jupiter that is worth remarking on. These satellites were studied very carefully by Rømer, who noticed that the moons sometimes seemed to be ahead of schedule, and sometimes behind. (One can find their schedules by waiting a very long time and finding out how long it takes on the average for the moons to go around.) Now they were ahead when Jupiter was particularly close to the earth and they were behind when Jupiter was farther from the earth. This would have been a very difficult thing to explain according to the law of gravitation—it would have been, in fact, the death of this wonderful theory if there were no other explanation. If a law does not work even in one place where it ought to, it is just wrong. But the reason for this discrepancy was very simple and beautiful: it takes a little while to see the moons of Jupiter because of the time it takes light to travel from Jupiter to the earth. When Jupiter is closer to the earth the time is a little less, and when it is farther from the earth, the time is more. This is why moons appear to be, on the average, a little ahead or a little behind, depending on whether they are closer to or farther from the earth. This phenomenon showed that light does not travel instantaneously, and furnished the first estimate of the speed of light. This was done in 1676.
Richard P. Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat)
It is 1908. The stars shone above in the night sky as a steamship floated among the clouds. It's captain, Captain Otra, looked at his watch. He was ahead of his delivery schedule by 30 minutes to deliver the British Government it's much-needed order of concentrated milk and goat cheese from the shores of New Zealand. He had inherited the business from his wife's father. His wife had passed roughly 5 years ago. His daughter Lux Otra was tinkering for the hundredth time on her grandfather's sky faring compass, taking it apart and putting it back together. Each time she fixed, the compass worked perfectly again. Memorizing these intricate steps would give her a temporary satisfaction but now she couldn't do it anymore. She set the compass down and sighed in frustration.
bellatuscana (Saving Time (Time-Traveling Agency, #1))
Before moving on, consider what your schedule currently looks like. I’m not asking about the things you did, but rather the things you committed to doing in writing. Is your schedule filled with carefully timeboxed plans, or is it mostly empty? Does it reflect who you are? Are you letting others steal your time or do you guard it as the limited and precious resource it is? By turning our values into time, we make sure we have time for traction. If we don’t plan ahead, we shouldn’t point fingers, nor should we be surprised when everything becomes a distraction. Being indistractable is largely about making sure you make time for traction each day and eliminating the distraction that keeps you from living the life you want—one that involves taking care of yourself, your relationships, and your work.
Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”20 Merton elegantly articulates how the pressure of the create-on-demand world can cause us to look sideways at our peers and competitors instead of looking ahead. The process of discovering and refining your voice takes time. Unnecessary Creation grants you the space to discover your unique aptitudes and passions through a process of trial, error, and play that won’t often be afforded to you otherwise. Initiating a project with no parameters and no expectations from others also forces you to stay self-aware while learning to listen to and follow your intuition. Both of these are crucial skills for discovering your voice. It’s completely understandable if you’re thinking, “But wait—I hardly have time to breathe, and now you want me to cram something else into my schedule, just for my own enjoyment?” It’s true that every decision about where we spend our time has an opportunity cost, and dedicating time to Unnecessary Creation seems like a remarkably inefficient choice. In truth, it is inefficient. Consider, however, the opportunity cost of spending your life only on pragmatics. You dedicate your time to pleasing everyone else and delivering on their expectations, but you never get around to discovering your deeper aptitudes and creative capacities. Nothing is worth that.
Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
To make matters worse, Unit 4 was at the end of a fuel cycle. One of the features of the RBMK design is ‘online refuelling’, which is the ability to swap out spent fuel while the reactor is at power. Because fuel burn-up is not even throughout the core, it was not uncommon for the reactor to contain both new and old fuel, which was usually replaced every two years. On April 26th, around 75% of the fuel was nearing the end of its cycle.95 This old fuel had, by now, been given time to accumulate hot and highly radioactive fission products, meaning any interruption in the flow of cooling water could quickly damage the older fuel channels and generate heat faster than the reactor was designed to cope with. Unit 4 was scheduled for a lengthy shutdown and annual maintenance period upon conclusion of the test, during which all of the old fuel would be replaced. It would have been far more sensible to conduct the test with fresh fuel, but management decided to push ahead anyway.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
The team is showing its appreciation to the host families by taking them to a water park on Sunday. I know Mac is going out of town, but I thought you might still want to go. I mean, not as a date or anything. I’m going to invite the whole family.” “You don’t have to work Sunday?” “I got scheduled off.” “Sounds like fun. We could pack a picnic lunch--” “I’ll take care of that. As my thank you. All you have to do is bring yourself.” “And a bathing suit.” He grinned. “Yeah, and a bathing suit.” “And a towel. And suntan lotion…” “Maybe it’d be simpler if I just said I’ll take care of the tickets and eats.” “Okay, but I’ll go ahead and warn you not to take it personally that Mom and Dad aren’t really into water parks. It’s that whole not-using-the-exercise-equipment-as-intended thing Dad has going.” His grin grew. “I won’t take it personally.” “Okay, then, Sunday.” As though suddenly realized how intimate it seemed to be in my bedroom, he cleared his throat and took a step back. He gave my room one more look and took another step back. “It’s amazing what a room can reveal.” Then he walked down the hallway and knocked on Tiffany’s door. I wondered what he’d discover looking into her room.
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
Your grandfather should not be allowed on social media,” Caroline went on. “He just did a quick and dirty post asking if anyone wanted to go owling with him, and never noticed that autocorrect changed ‘owling’ to ‘bowling.’ And before I noticed it and posted a correction, several dozen people signed up.” “Good grief,” I muttered. “And once I corrected it, we started hearing from any number of people saying how deeply disappointed they were about our canceling the bowling—as if you could cancel something that wasn’t even scheduled in the first place. So he told me to go ahead and organize some kind of bowling event. Open to anyone in the Brigade, no cost, but donation to one of the Blake Foundation’s environmental projects suggested. Brigade members love events like that. We’re sure to get way more donations than it costs to rent a few bowling lanes. Now I just need to figure out how to deal with his other typo, which won’t be quite as easy.” “Why?” I asked. “What was the other typo?” “He intended to say that we’d wrap up the event by singing around a campfire,” Caroline said. “I have no idea why autocorrect changed ‘campfire’ to ‘vampire.’ Or why anyone would suppose he’d be planning to serenade one. Am I really expected to provide a vampire on top of the bowling?
Donna Andrews (Dashing Through the Snowbirds (Meg Langslow Mysteries Book 32))
Trains are about getting from point A to point B in a timely, efficient manner. They rumble through town on a predetermined path, with a sequence of stops to make and a schedule to keep. A train has a plan, and the plan moves in one direction, with little regard for anyone or anything beyond its path. It’s no surprise that cities and towns turn their worst side to the tracks. A park, on the other hand, is the opposite. A park has no agenda and makes no exclusions. It is welcoming, lovely, and nurturing. It is a forum for life; a congregation of unscheduled joy, laughter, and leisure. Cities bring their most important events to parks: weddings, recreation, picnics, relaxation. People bring life to the park because the park invites them in, no matter who they are. No ticket required. No schedule to obey. The parks, in a word, are turned outward; the tracks are turned inward. The parks give unceasingly to their community; the train rumbles through. This is a picture of how we can approach our loves: We can choose to be trains or parks. We can plan our lives with rigid precision, ignore everyone who isn’t sitting beside us, and simply forge ahead with our own agenda. Or, we can be present in our lives and open ourselves up to the chaos of love. I’m sure we can all think of examples of people in our own lives, whether married or not, who operate as trains and who operate as parks.
Hexe Claire (Altared: The True Story of a She, a He, and How They Both Got Too Worked Up About We)
5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.
Robert Greene (Mastery)
Olo-keZ G-- a tc There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven. -ECCLESIASTES 3:1 What would we do without our day planners? I have a large one for my desk and a carry-all that goes with me. I don't know how a person functions without some type of organizer. I just love it; it truly has become my daily-calendar bible. I take it with me everywhere. My whole life is in that book. Each evening I peek in to see what tomorrow has to bring. I just love to see a busy calendar; it makes me feel so alive. I've got this to do and that to do. Then I come upon a day that has all white space. Not one thing to do. What, oh what, will I do to fill the space and time? That's the way I used to think and plan. All my spaces had appointments written down, and many times they even overlapped. I now plan for white spaces. I even plan ahead weeks or months and black out "saved for me or my family" days. I have begun to realize that there are precious times for myself and my loved ones. Bob and I really try to protect these saved spaces just for us. We may not go anywhere or do anything out of the ordinary, but it's our special time. We can do anything we want: sleep in, stay out late, go to lunch, read a book, go to a movie, or take a nap. I really look forward with great anticipation to when these white spaces appear on my calendar. I've been so impressed when I've read biographies of famous people. Many of them are controllers of their own time. They don't let outsiders dictate their schedules. Sure, there are times when things have to be done on special days, but generally that isn't the case. When we begin to control our calendars, we will find that our lives are more enjoyable and that the tensions of life are more manageable. Make those white spaces your friend, not your enemy.
Emilie Barnes (The Tea Lover's Devotional)
A sudden yowl from up ahead had them all starting. A small tree smoked on one side, the faint glow of fire darting from a burning patch of dead foliage. The yowl came again. Matt hurried over and peered up the tree to see a calico cat, its green eyes staring down, as if in accusation. "No," Reyna said, stopping beside him. "We are not rescuing the cat." "But the tree -" "- is on fire. I see that. Have you ever owned a cat? If they can go up, they can come down. Guaranteed." Matt eyed the feline. It eyed him back, then yowled, as if to say Well, hurry it up. "It might be too scared to come down," he said. "It's a cat," Reyna said. "They don't get scared - just annoyed, which I'm going to get if you insist on playing hero and rescuing that faker." She scowled at the cat. "Yes, I mean you. Faker." The cat sniffed, then turned to Matt, clearly sensing the softer touch. Owen stepped forward. "If you'll feel better rescuing the cat, Matt, then go ahead. We aren't on a tight schedule." Reyna waved her arms around the smoking street. "Um, Ragnarök?" "And the longer you two bicker ..." "Fine," Reyna said. "I've got this." Before Matt could protest, she walked to the base of the tree, grabbed the lowest branch, and swung up. "Rodeo girl, remember? Also, five years of gymnastics, which my mother thought would make me more graceful and feminine. Her mistake." She shimmied along a branch. "Come on, faker. I'm your designated hero for today." She looked down at Matt. "And if you ever tell anyone I rescued a cat from a tree ..." Before Matt could answer, the cat sprang to the ground. "Arggh!" Reyna said. "You scared him out," Matt said. "He just needed the extra motivation. No, wait. It's a she. Calicos are almost always female." "Are they? Huh." Reyna swung out. The cat sat on the ground below, watching. "See?" Matt said. "She's grateful." "She's gloating. Let's go.
K.L. Armstrong (Thor's Serpents (The Blackwell Pages #3))
When Oppenheimer took the floor and began speaking in his soft voice, everyone listened in absolute silence. Wilson recalled that Oppenheimer “dominated” the discussion. His main argument essentially drew on Niels Bohr’s vision of “openness.” The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons. They had to forge ahead, he explained, to the point where the gadget could be tested. He pointed out that the new United Nations was scheduled to hold its inaugural meeting in April 1945—and that it was important that the delegates begin their deliberations on the postwar world with the knowledge that mankind had invented these weapons of mass destruction. “I thought that was a very good argument,” said Wilson. For some time now, Bohr and Oppenheimer himself had talked about how the gadget was going to change the world. The scientists knew that the gadget was going to force a redefinition of the whole notion of national sovereignty. They had faith in Franklin Roosevelt and believed that he was setting up the United Nations precisely to address this conundrum. As Wilson put it, “There would be areas in which there would be no sovereignty, the sovereignty would exist in the United Nations. It was to be the end of war as we knew it, and this was a promise that was made. That is why I could continue on that project.” Oppenheimer had prevailed, to no one’s surprise, by articulating the argument that the war could not end without the world knowing the terrible secret of Los Alamos. It was a defining moment for everyone. The logic— Bohr’s logic—was particularly compelling to Oppenheimer’s fellow scientists. But so too was the charismatic man who stood before them. As Wilson recalled that moment, “My feeling about Oppenheimer was, at that time, that this was a man who is angelic, true and honest and he could do no wrong. . . . I believed in him.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
2002, three years ahead of schedule and just one year after Forbes called the idea “off the wall,” Samsung’s market capitalization exceeded Sony’s. By 2005, its market cap of $75 billion was twice that of Sony’s.
Euny Hong (The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture)
Getting ready on the day of launch takes much longer than you’d think it would, like so many aspects of spaceflight. First I take a final trip to the banya to relax, then go through the preflight enema ritual—our guts shut down in space initially, so the Russians encourage us to get things cleaned out ahead of time. The cosmonauts have their doctors do this, with warm water and rubber hoses, but I opt for the drugstore type in private, which lets me maintain a comfortable friendship with my flight surgeon. I savor a bath in the Jacuzzi tub, then a nap (because our launch is scheduled for 1:42 a.m. local time). When I wake, I take a shower, lingering awhile. I know how much I’ll miss the feeling of water for the next year. The Russian flight surgeon we call “Dr. No” shows up shortly after I’m out of the shower. He is called Dr. No because he gets to decide whether our families can see us once we’re in quarantine. His decisions are arbitrary, sometimes mean-spirited, and absolute. He is here to wipe down our entire bodies with alcohol wipes. The original idea behind the alcohol swab-down was to kill any germs trying to stow away with space travelers, but now it seems like just another ritual. After a champagne toast with senior management and our significant others, we sit in silence for a minute, a Russian tradition before a long trip. As we leave the building, a Russian Orthodox priest will bless us and throw holy water into each of our faces. Every cosmonaut since Yuri Gagarin has gone through each of these steps, so we will go through them, too. I’m not religious, but I always say that when you’re getting ready to be rocketed into space, a blessing can’t hurt.
Scott Kelly (Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery)
Action Steps 1. Evaluate your progress regarding the tasks on your to-do list before offering to help other people. Note how much time you’ve allocated to each task and determine whether you have enough time left in the day to address them as planned. If you’re ahead of schedule, offer your help to the person asking for it. Otherwise, tactfully say “no” and explain your reason. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with helping people. You should do so whenever you can. But you need to make sure you’re not jeopardizing the quality or timeliness of your own work in the process. 2. Remind yourself that few requests are truly emergencies. People seeking help usually want to receive it immediately. Their urgency rarely stems from a crisis. Rather, most people simply want whatever they seek sooner rather than later. It’s human nature. Before offering your help, determine whether a true crisis exists that warrants your swift attention. Again, most “emergencies” aren’t emergencies at all. 3. Ask whether you can help the person later. That allows you to say “no” and simultaneously appear willing to accommodate the individual. This approach also helps you to retain control of your time, a crucial part of working productively. People who hear this response will find it to be more palatable than a simple “no.” 4. Find out what you’re being asked to commit yourself to. When people ask for help, they often downplay the amount of time it will take. For example, consider the times you’ve heard someone ask you, “Got a second for a quick question?” Ask the person seeking your help to clearly describe what he or she wants you to do for them. If the tasks involved require more time than you have to offer, you’ll have a suitable reason to decline. 5. Decide in advance the activities you won’t help others with. Placing limits on the types of work you’re willing to address will make it easier to rebuff requests for help. For example, you might decide to shun making phone calls before 10:00 a.m. because you know such calls expose you to potential time sinks. A planned 3-minute call can easily turn into 20 minutes if the person you’ve called is chatty. If a coworker asks you to call a vendor or client for him or her, tactfully decline and explain your reason.
Damon Zahariades (The 30-Day Productivity Boost (Vol. 1): 30 Bad Habits That Are Sabotaging Your Time Management (And How To Fix Them!))
My philosophy is that for complicated jobs, if you aren't ahead of schedule, you're already behind.
Scott Kelly (Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery)
But in 2009, even as the British track cycling team was preparing for the London Olympics, Brailsford embarked upon a new challenge. He created a road cycling team, Team Sky, while continuing to oversee the track team. On the day the new outfit was announced to the world, Brailsford also announced that they would win the Tour de France within five years. Most people laughed at this aspiration. One commentator said: “Brailsford has set himself up for an almighty fall.” But in 2012, two years ahead of schedule, Bradley Wiggins became the first-ever British rider to win the event. The following year, Team Sky triumphed again when Chris Froome, another Brit, won the general classification. It was widely acclaimed as one of the most extraordinary feats in British sporting history. How did it happen? How did Brailsford conquer not one cycling discipline, but two? These were the questions I asked him over dinner at the team’s small hotel after the tour of the facilities. His answer was clear: “It is about marginal gains,” he said. “The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together.” It sounds simple, but as a philosophy, marginal gains has become one of the hottest concepts not just in sports, but beyond. It has formed the basis of business conferences, and seminars and has even been debated in the armed forces. Many British sports now employ a director of marginal gains.
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
Hi, I’m Kirk Cameron. I know I’m late . . .” “You are,” he said. He looked at his watch. “The audition was at 4:30. It’s 5.” He started to close the door. Instinctively, I put my foot out so he couldn’t close it. “I know, I know. But my mom will kill me if I don’t do this audition. Please can I read just to tell her I did it?” He looked over his shoulder, probably to ask what the others thought, then opened the door. I had no idea what I was auditioning for except that it was a “pilot”—the first episode of a TV series that determines whether the network will put the show on its schedule. I’d gotten the script ahead of time but had really only glanced at it. I knew nothing about the show. To me, the title Growing Pains sounded dramatic and gritty. I left the audition without a sense of how things had gone. They laughed, but I wasn’t sure they were supposed to.
Kirk Cameron (Still Growing: An Autobiography)
In simple terms, the trade start buying the product on discount to hold in stock for future sale at a higher margin rather than sell immediately. They make money by taking advantage of contradicting discounts and promotional schedules and then selling the product for a higher price at a later date. This is not uncommon. If a manufacturer offers promotional prices every other month, a retailer will forward buy five weeks’ supply at the end of each promotional month. It is not unknown for a retailer to buy a year’s supply ahead of a major price rise. At
Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
A Phillips serial (in contrast to the jerky, obvious, and corny melodramas of the Hummerts) usually contained just one main scene in each installment, peopled by only two characters. Her scenes were sparse, the settings lean, the people clear without the endless repetition of names that filled a Hummert soap. Phillips was the first serial writer to effectively blend her soaps. Her popular Today’s Children was phased out of its first run in 1938 by having its characters sit around the radio and listen to The Woman in White, which replaced it. When three of her soaps were scheduled consecutively and sponsored by General Mills in 1944, Phillips expanded this idea of integrated storylines. The major characters of the resurrected Today’s Children drifted through The Guiding Light, and mutual visits with The Woman in White were also common. Ed Prentiss, who was then playing Ned Holden of The Guiding Light, was used as a “master of ceremonies” for the hour, a guide through the intricate framework of the three soaps. The fourth quarter-hour was filled with nondenominational religious music, Hymns of All Churches. At one time during this period, Phillips was considering breaking the traditional lengths, running stories of ten to 20 minutes each rather than the precise quarter-hours. After a season of this experimenting, the block was dismantled, and The Guiding Light went into its postwar phase. In the earliest phase, it followed the Ruthledge family. The Rev. John Ruthledge had come to Five Points two decades before, establishing himself and his church as the driving force in the community. This had not been easy. Five Points was a “melting pot of humanity,” as Phillips described it, with Poles, Slavs, Swedes, Germans, Irish, and Jews living in uneasy proximity. As one character described it, it was a neighborhood of “poverty, gossipy neighbors, sordid surroundings,” with “no chance to get ahead.” Ruthledge had run into stiff neighborhood opposition, but now he was accepted and even beloved. His Little Church of Five Points had become popularly known as the Church of the Good Samaritan:
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
SCHEDULING. Now you can look at the week ahead with your goals in mind and schedule time to achieve them.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Revised and Updated: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
Leverage Integrations as a Service In a start-up, you always need to be on the lookout for shortcuts to save you time and money. Don’t corners that will have a negative effect—just look for ways to triple your productivity. No matter how fast I could build integrations, I could never build them all. But in 2012, a new company called Zapier was building a platform to integrate web services together. This was perfect for WebMerge, as I could essentially build an integration to every one of their connected apps, with one single integration. WebMerge was one of the first 100 apps on Zapier, and it instantly allowed WebMerge customers to integrate their documents with each of those 100 apps. Over the years, Zapier blew up and now has thousands of apps available. Zapier was by far our largest integration partner with over 50 percent of our revenue coming from customers using Zapier. Investing in this early platform was crucial and sped up our integration releases by many years. What’s your Zapier story? Is there a partner out there that can open your business to a whole new market—or just help you get your product in front of new customers years ahead of schedule?
Jeremy Clarke (Bootstrapped to Millions: How I Built a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with No Investors or Employees)
Sam was too good for my self-control, and he sent me onto a bullet train to Climaxville way ahead of schedule. Premature isn’t just for guys, and I was embarrassingly too quick.
Alessa Kelly (Montana's Bravest (Red Mark Rescue & Protect))
Think Motion. The perfect project timeline is only slightly less elusive than the Holy Grail. It takes some effort to figure it out, but once you do, you’ll have created a template that promotes success. You may not be the person tasked with creating timelines, but you can try to influence those who are. This is the kind of thing that most people just accept, but they shouldn’t. The right timing is as important as the right people. Always be wary of the “comfortable” timeline—it’s just a fact of life that a degree of pressure keeps things moving ahead with purpose. With too much time in the schedule, you’re just inviting more opinions, and more opportunities to have your ideas nibbled to death. Keep things in motion at all times.
Ken Segall (Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success)
Judy Parsons: It surprised me because Jim was never that big of a drinker. But I think that was part of his inner dedication, like, I’m gonna give that up, and focus completely on this part. And he did! I was a little shocked the first time he didn’t get a margarita when he came home ’cause in Texas we drink a lot of margaritas. But he stuck to that. Jim Parsons: I wasn’t being so good at focusing myself during that time. I didn’t have any schedule I had to keep. It’s not that anything got out of hand, but I knew that there was work ahead, and I wanted to be ready for it. I wanted to get out of this limbo-ish haze that was going on, but I still didn’t have anything to work on since we were waiting on a new date to shoot the pilot. So it was kind of my own project I could give myself. My thinking was, I’ll still go out and see people, but I’m now going to do it completely sober. I started moving my schedule into more of a “Be up in time for the first hour of the Today show” type of thing as opposed to getting up at the end of Regis and Kelly. And I really liked how I felt once I stopped drinking and started setting a schedule. I kept moving the goalpost, so to speak. I had no intention of going nine years. Instead, I was like, I’m going to wait and see if we get picked up. If we get picked up, then I’ll have a drink! And then from there it was Wait and see if we got picked up for the back nine episodes. And then from there it was Do we get a second season? And then, Can we get Emmy nominations? It was always something to the point it became a little bit of a superstition.
Jessica Radloff (The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series)
Monday night marked our first Astrology Class in the Earth Observatory. And it didn't start until eight o'clock. I was distracted during my Liaison while Orion sat across his desk from me, attempting to explain Nymph anatomy in greater detail while I tried not to wonder what those lips would feel like against more places than my neck. I bet his kisses taste like bourbon and power. “Miss Vega?” I blinked, snapping myself out of my latest dirty daydream as Orion rose from his seat. “Time's up,” he answered my questioning expression. “I'm so glad I didn't waste my time tonight. You've been listening so attentively.” His narrowed eyes told me that was sarcasm and I gave him an apologetic grin. Well I had fun anyway. I gathered up my bag, wishing I could head back to my room, have a shower and change out of this uniform. But according to the email I'd received when the class had been added to my timetable, we had to turn up dressed in the Zodiac uniform even for lessons after hours. “I'll walk you back to your House,” Orion said. “And maybe on the way you can tell me exactly what you've spent the last hour thinking about.” He strode toward the door with a smirk and I followed him across the room, my heart pitter-pattering. “No thanks, I've got Astrology now, sir,” I said, saying absolutely nothing more about my daydreams. Those can never see the light of day. “Then I'll take you to Earth Observatory.” Orion stepped out into the hall, waiting for me as I followed. I frowned at him. “I think I can manage a ten minute walk alone.” “Well I'm heading in that direction anyway so we may as well go together.” Orion headed off and I fell into step beside him, fighting an eye-roll. We headed onto the path beyond Jupiter Hall and a yawn pulled at my mouth as we turned in the direction of Earth Observatory. Students were spilling out of The Orb heading back to their Houses, but I wasn't jealous. Despite the long-ass day I'd had, I was excited to attend my first ever Astrology class. Supposedly our schedule was going to fill up even more once we passed The Reckoning. Or if we passed it. God I hope we do. We might end up back in Chicago after all. Even Darius’s gold doesn’t make me feel much better about that. I spent most of my free time practising Elemental magic with Tory and the others in preparation for the exam. Orion was still refusing to teach us anything practical in class, and I half wondered if his vague promises of practical lessons would really ever come to fruition. I stole a look at him as we walked in perfect silence, finding it surprisingly not awkward. I noticed the deep set of his eyes, the way his shoulders were slightly tense and his fingers were flexing a little. “Are you expecting an ambush?” I teased and he glanced my way, his expression deadly serious. “You should always expect an ambush, Miss Vega.” “Oh,” I breathed, figuring he was probably right considering the way the Fae world carried on. I'd not really thought about what it might be like to live somewhere beyond the walls of the Academy. Would it be just as cut-throat out there as it was in here? “Darcy!” Sofia's voice caught my attention and I spotted her up ahead with Diego, standing outside the observatory. She beckoned me over and I stopped walking, looking to Orion to say goodbye. He turned to me too and a strange energy passed between us as we simply stood there for much longer than was necessary. Why are we even stopping to say goodbye? Why am I not just walking away now? He half tipped his head then shot away at high-speed, disappearing back the way we'd come. So he hadn’t been heading this way. I knew it. His casual stalking was clearly to do with his worries over a Nymph getting its probes into my magic. “Daaarccccyy!” Sofia sang and I turned back to them, finding her on Diego's back, waving her arms. (Darcy)
Caroline Peckham (Ruthless Fae (Zodiac Academy, #2))
Whether we like it or not, China, Russia and others see us and our success as a threat to their ambitions. That is the main reason why they interfere in our domestic politics by spreading disinformation to cause chaos. Our downfall is their victory; our success is a threat. This all means that we will, at some point, be forced to respond. And it is better to do so ahead of schedule rather than behind.
Charles Dunst
John was never stressed. He completed important work ahead of schedule yet somehow found time for side projects.
Jake Knapp (Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day)
the present moment. What can you get done today, tomorrow, or next week that will bring you that much closer to your final destination? See if you can project a bit and schedule just the first three steps on your list into your planning system. The rest will come later. Then go for it! Move ahead each day with the vision of that goal in mind and keep pressing forward.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook)
Knowing what you're going to write, making sure you're rested and ready to go, having enough time blocked off to do the writing, and having everything you need at hand to get things done. If you've taken care of these things ahead of time, you are far more likely to be productive than if you have to make up a plan on the spot for that day's writing session. If you're feeling that your writing sessions aren't as productive as they could be, my strong guess is that one of the four planning factors is the issue. To put yourself in a position to have a great writing session requires four steps: Make sure that your Model Week and Weekly Plan create a writing schedule that allows you to be productive. This requires that you know when you are alert and creative enough to write well, but also to understand how long a session needs to be so that you have enough time to get into a rhythm while not going so long that your focus and productivity fall off a cliff. Identify a clear set of tactics to work on during each writing session. This starts with your 12 Week Plan when you identify your 12 Week goals and associated tactics, and it takes concrete form in your Weekly
A Trevor Thrall (The 12 Week Year for Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to Getting Your Writing Done)
Ah, the sacred art of "me time"! It's like pressing the pause button on life's chaos and indulging in some serious self-love. Whether it's binge-watching your favorite show, treating yourself to a spa day at home, or simply curling up with a good book and a cup of tea, me time is all about reclaiming your sanity and recharging your batteries. So, go ahead, carve out some space in your busy schedule, and remember: you can't pour from an empty cup, so take care of yourself first.
Life is Positive
BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001 Phone Number +91 8884400919 Situated off the southeast shore of Africa, Mauritius is a shocking island country in the Indian Sea known for its perfectly clear waters, white sandy sea shores, and lavish green scenes. The volcanic island flaunts pleasant coral reefs and a different scope of verdure. Culture and Language Mauritius is a mixture of societies, with impacts from Indian, African, Chinese, and European practices. Local people communicate in a blend of dialects, with English, French, Creole, and Hindi being ordinarily utilized. This social variety is reflected in the island's food, music, and celebrations. 2. Outline of Mauritius Visit Bundles Sorts of Visit Bundles Accessible Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore offer various choices, from extravagant ocean side hotels to daring eco-the travel industry encounters. Whether you're searching for a heartfelt escape, a family get-away, or a performance experience, there's a bundle to suit each voyager's inclinations. Irregularity and Best Times to Visit The best opportunity to visit Mauritius is from May to December when the weather conditions is cooler and drier, ideal for investigating the island's attractions and appreciating outside exercises. Top vacationer season is from October to April, so reserving your visit bundle ahead of time is suggested. 3. Features of a Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore Flight Subtleties and Travel Length Departures from Bangalore to Mauritius normally take around 7 to 8 hours, with non-stop flights accessible for a helpful travel insight. Some visit bundles might incorporate flight appointments and air terminal exchanges for a problem free excursion. Considerations and Prohibitions in the Bundle Normal considerations in Mauritius visit bundles are convenience, dinners, touring visits, and exercises, for example, water sports and spa medicines. Rejections might shift yet frequently incorporate travel protection, visa charges, and individual costs. 4. Convenience and Transportation Choices Well known Lodging Decisions in Mauritius Mauritius offers a scope of facilities, from extravagance resorts disregarding the sea to shop lodgings settled in tropical nurseries. Famous decisions remember ocean front pieces of land for Terrific Baie, extravagance withdraws in Beauty Female horse, and eco-accommodating hotels in Dark Waterway Canyons Public Park. Transportation inside Mauritius Transportation choices in Mauritius incorporate taxicabs, rental vehicles, and public transports for getting around the island. Many visit bundles give air terminal exchanges and may likewise incorporate confidential transportation for touring visits and journeys. 5. Energizing Exercises and Attractions in Mauritius Ocean side Exercises and Water Sports Mauritius is a heaven for ocean side darlings and daredevils the same. From lazing on the immaculate sandy sea shores to enjoying an assortment of water sports, for example, swimming, scuba jumping, and parasailing, there is no deficiency of energy here. Whether you're a carefully prepared surfer or a fledgling hoping to get a few waves, Mauritius offers something for everybody. Investigating Nature and Untamed life Nature fans will be in wonderment of Mauritius' different scenes, from lavish woods and cascades to shocking greenhouses. Investigate the Dark Stream Crevasses Public Park to detect extraordinary widely varied vegetation, or visit the Seven Shaded Earths in Chamarel for a characteristic miracle. Try not to botch the opportunity to experience monster turtles at the Île aux Aigrettes nature hold for a really remarkable encounter. 6. Test Schedule for a Mauritius Visit from Bangalore
Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore
Dealing with an Upholder Child In most ways, the parents of Upholder children have an easy time. Upholder children want to understand and meet expectations, and they’re self-motivated. Parents don’t have to be involved in many homework battles or remind a child to feed a fish. An Upholder child will practice the piano without many reminders, plan ahead to pack the right soccer equipment, and keep track of the school schedule. Parents enjoy this aspect of Upholderness, but they may get frustrated when a child can’t turn off the Upholder Tendency. From time to time, they want the child to loosen up or let go of expectations. Not likely. The Upholder child may go nuts if he can’t do the thirty minutes of reading that he’s supposed to do before bed or if she arrives five minutes late for school.
Gretchen Rubin (The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People's Lives Better, Too))
It's a myth that trimming your hair routinely will make it grow quicker; it has no effect whatsoever. The truth of the matter is however, in the event that you trim your hair routinely, it will uproot any harmed parts ahead of schedule, before the harm can spread further up the strands of your hair.
Emily Kirk (Natural Hair: How to Grow Long and Healthy Hair: Natural Hair-Care Recipes for Hair Growth and Health)
SCHEDULING. Now you can look at the week ahead with your goals in mind and schedule time to achieve them. For example, if your goal is to produce the first draft of your personal mission statement, you may want to set aside a two-hour block of time on Sunday to work on it. Sunday (or some other day of the week that is special to you, your faith, or your circumstances) is often the ideal time to plan your more personally uplifting activities, including weekly organizing. It’s a good time to draw back, to seek inspiration, to look at your life in the context of principles and values. If you set a goal to become physically fit through exercise, you may want to set aside an hour three or four days during the week, or possibly every day during the week, to accomplish that goal. There are some goals that you may only be able to accomplish
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
The princes of hell were too old, too powerful to operate on Earth. They couldn’t even set foot here without kicking off the apocalypse ahead of schedule. So every prince had a hound: the one demon in their court who was smart enough, tough enough, and mean enough to take care of their court’s business and scare all the other hellspawn into submission.
Craig Schaefer (A Plain-Dealing Villain (Daniel Faust, #4))
Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.
Robert Greene (Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1))
Why would someone want to start a museum in New York City when the Whitney and the Modern were already there? The answer was that the bigger museums were ill-equipped to respond quickly to radical or sudden changes in the arts, in part because exhibitions had to be scheduled years ahead of time to allow for securing loans, preparing catalogue, and, most important of all, obtaining funding.
Marcia Tucker (A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World)
A third example of this was when we said, "Let's make some kind of coupon system"—because we had this idea that we would send people an automatic email when they visited our website that would tell them—and we had all these crazy ideas like, "Buy our software within the next 72 hours and get 25 percent off." (That thing was actually a bot that we wrote years ago, and it still runs. If you try CityDesk, which is our least popular product right now, you will get an automatic email with a 25 percent–off coupon that you have to use in the next 72 hours.) When we launched that, it did increase our sales a little bit. It gets people to evaluate the demo version right away—because they don't want to lose their 25 percent off coupon which is going to expire. These were all marginally good marketing ideas. Unfortunately we spent a lot of time chasing them. The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we spent on any one of these crazy things—although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them—was nothing compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken all the effort we put into these crazy schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more. That was probably the biggest mistake we made. And that's the advice I give everybody. All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot all about how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, great, just improve it. Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you. Only talk to your customers and your potential customers and see what it is that caused them not to buy your product or would cause them to buy more copies of it. And do that, and then ship it. That was something we really, really should have focused on, but, you know, we didn't know any better.
Jessica Livingston (Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days)
Leadership as a Service But the best leadership—the kind that people can mention only with evident emotion and deep respect—is most often exercised by people without positional power. It happens outside the official hierarchy of delegated authority. When I’m on my home turf, I play tennis two or three times a week in groups organized by a charming fellow named Mike. Mike is our leader. It’s Mike who decides the matchups: who plays with whom and against whom. He’s the one who shuffles the players (16 of us on four courts) after each set so we all have different partners for all three sets. He invariably makes good pairings so that near the end of a half hour you can look across the courts and see four scores like 5 to 4, 6 to 6, 7 to 6, and 5 to 5. He has a great booming voice, easy to hear even when he is three courts away. He sets the meeting times, negotiates the schedules for court time, and makes sure there are subs for anyone who needs to be away. Nobody gave Mike the job of leading the group; he just stepped up and took it. His leadership is uncontested; the rest of us are just in awe of our good fortune that he leads us as he does. He gets nothing for it except our gratitude and esteem. —TDM In this example, leadership is not about extracting anything from us; it’s about service. The leadership that the Mikes of the world provide enables their endeavors to go forth. While they sometimes set explicit directions, their main role is that of a catalyst, not a director. They make it possible for the magic to happen. In order to lead without positional authority—without anyone ever appointing you leader—you have to do what Mike does: • Step up to the task. • Be evidently fit for the task. • Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time. • Maximize value to everyone. • Do it all with humor and obvious goodwill. It also helps to have charisma.
Tom DeMarco (Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams)
A reality of personal productivity is that humans are not great at estimating the time required for cognitive endeavors. We’re wired to understand the demands of tangible efforts, like crafting a hand ax, or gathering edible plants. When it comes to planning pursuits for which we lack physical intuition, however, we’re guessing more than we realize, leading us to gravitate toward best-case scenarios for how long things might take. We seem to seek the thrill that comes from imagining a wildly ambitious timeline during our planning: “Wow, if I could finish four chapters this fall, I’d really be ahead of schedule!” It feels good in the moment but sets us up for scrambling and disappointment in the days that follow. By deploying a blanket policy of doubling these initial estimates, you can counter this instinct toward unjustified optimism. The result: plans that can be completed at a more leisurely pace. The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place.
Cal Newport (Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout)
A reality of personal productivity is that humans are not great at estimating the time required for cognitive endeavors. We’re wired to understand the demands of tangible efforts, like crafting a hand ax, or gathering edible plants. When it comes to planning pursuits for which we lack physical intuition, however, we’re guessing more than we realize, leading us to gravitate toward best-case scenarios for how long things might take. We seem to seek the thrill that comes from imagining a wildly ambitious timeline during our planning: “Wow, if I could finish four chapters this fall, I’d really be ahead of schedule!” It feels good in the moment but sets us up for scrambling and disappointment in the days that follow. By deploying a blanket policy of doubling these initial estimates, you can counter this instinct toward unjustified optimism. The result: plans that can be completed at a more leisurely pace. The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place.
Cal Newport (Author)
Maybe I'm "reading it all wrong" after all. Maybe I'm just jumping ahead again, making assumptions, preparing for my own heartbreak, planning for rejection. Creating a schedule for a future that isn't going to happen.
Holly Smale (Cassandra in Reverse)
You know my Dahlia, independent as always,” the older man says fondly. “We found out one of our daughter’s schoolmates was bullying her. Dahlia stormed out of the house with two cans of gasoline, a blow torch, and a bad attitude.” He looks down at his watch and nods. “She should be burning their house down right about now. She’ll join us when she’s done and if anyone comes asking, two hundred witnesses will claim she was here all night.” His eyes lift above my shoulder and soften. “Oh, look. She’s ahead of schedule,” he says adoringly.
Khai Hara (Devil Mine (London Underworld, #1))
AS ALWAYS EMERSON WAS A LITTLE AHEAD OF HIMSELF. Perhaps the direct acceptance of age gave him a momentary sense that he had overcome it. During 1867 he gave eighty lectures; he made two western trips through fourteen states. Only once before, in 1856, had he taken on so heavy a schedule.
Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Emerson: The Mind on Fire)
LOW: Sales Effort Sales effort is a measure of the length of your sales cycle and includes the number of touch points required to make the sale. Where CAC measures the amount of money you’re spending to get a new customer, sales effort measures the time and energy you’re spending. The best way to track sales effort is to look at both the average number of days from someone scheduling their first demo to closing and the number of calls it takes to close a deal. Your ability to keep sales effort low depends greatly on your industry and customer base. If you’re doing enterprise sales, your sales cycle will be long and require more effort than if you’re targeting solopreneurs and other small businesses with a single decision-maker. A three- or four-month sales cycle is reasonable in enterprise sales—and worth it because the ACV might be $50,000. If you’re spending that much time for $5,000 contracts, though, that’s rough. No matter what your sales process looks like, you want your sales effort to be as low as possible. Here are some ways to lower this number. Self-Serve Sign-up and Onboarding. Many inexpensive products can get away with low price points because they have a low-touch or no-touch sales process. They have a self-serve sign-up and onboarding process, which requires almost no sales effort. The higher your ARPA, the less likely they are to become customers without some sales effort. But finding places to offer self-service along the journey can reduce the amount of hand-holding your team has to do while making the process speedier for your customer. One-Call Close. Self-service isn’t going to work in a lot of spaces, but you can try to get to a point where the decision is made by a single person. You can do this by targeting a founder, a developer, or a single manager. You can also streamline the back-and-forth of providing more sales materials, getting on second calls, waiting for input from the committee—and on and on. Educate your customers as much as you can ahead of time so they have the information they need and develop checklists to gather the information you need to close the deal quickly.
Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)
And then the omnipotent Integral intervened … a practical joker to the end! Early on the morning of April 12, the fabulous but anonymous Builder of the Integral, Chief Designer of the Sputniks, struck another of his cruel but dramatic blows. Just twenty days before the first scheduled Mercury flight he sent a five-ton Sputnik called Vostok I into orbit around the earth with a man aboard, the first cosmonaut, a twenty-seven-year-old test pilot named Yuri Gagarin. Vostok I completed one orbit, then brought Gagarin down safely, on land, near the Soviet village of Smelovka. The omnipotent Integral! NASA had really believed—and the astronauts had really believed—that somehow, in the religious surge of the mission, Shepard’s flight would be the first. But there was no putting one over on the Integral, was there! It was as if the Soviets’ Chief Designer, that invisible genius, was toying with them. Back in October 1957, just four months before the United States was supposed to launch the world’s first artificial earth satellite, the Chief Designer had launched Sputnik I. In January 1959, just two months before NASA was scheduled to put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the sun, the Chief Designer launched Mechta I and did just that. But this one, Vostok I, in April 1961, had been his pièce de resistance. Given the huge booster rockets at his disposal, he seemed to be able to play these little games with his adversaries at will. There was the eerie feeling that he would continue to let NASA struggle furiously to catch up—and then launch some startling new demonstration of just how far ahead he really was.
Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff)
By early afternoon the Carpathia had passed the last of the ice and could begin to pick up speed, but at 4:00 p.m its engines were stopped. Father Anderson then appeared on deck in his clerical garb, followed by Carpathia crewmen carrying four corpses sewn into canvas bags. These were the bodies of two male passengers, one fireman, and one seaman, that had been brought aboard from the lifeboats. Each of the canvas bags in turn was laid on a wide plank and covered with a flag. As the words “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep” were read aloud, the bodies were tipped into the sea one at a time. A large crowd stood nearby with heads bared. The canvas bags had been weighted so that the bodies would fall feet first but one of them struck the water flat. A Carpathia passenger wrote that he would never forget the sound of that splash. One of those buried at sea was first-class passenger William F. Hoyt, the heavy man who had been pulled into Boat 14 and died shortly thereafter. When May Futrelle learned that a large man had been lifted into one of the lifeboats, she questioned the crew of Boat 14 but soon realized that the man they described could not have been her husband. She also heard that Archibald Gracie had been pulled under with the ship and worked up her courage to ask him if he had suffered as he was being dragged down. Gracie reassured her that if he had never come up, he would have had no more suffering, giving May some comfort that perhaps Jacques had not endured an agonizing death. That afternoon Charles Lightoller had a serious talk with the three other surviving officers, Pitman, Boxhall, and Lowe, about what lay ahead. It was agreed that their best hope for escaping what Lightoller called “the inquisition” that awaited in New York was to immediately board the Cedric, scheduled to sail for Liverpool on Thursday. Their case was taken to Bruce Ismay who sent a message to Philip Franklin suggesting that the Cedric be held for the Titanic’s crew and himself. Ismay also asked that clothes and shoes be put on board for him. The cable was signed “Yamsi,” his coded signature for personal messages.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Fletcher was aware that the Japanese invasion force headed for Tulagi had been sighted as it approached the Solomon Islands, but he didn’t know that Task Force 11, which had completed refueling ahead of schedule, was only 69 miles east of Task Force 17.
Hourly History (Battle of the Coral Sea - World War II: A History from Beginning to End (World War 2 Battles))
You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. Planning ahead is the only way to know the difference between traction and distraction. •​Does your calendar reflect your values? To be the person you want to be, you have to make time to live your values. •​Timebox your day. The three life domains of you, relationships, and work provide a framework for planning how to spend your time. •​Reflect and refine. Revise your schedule regularly, but you must commit to it once it’s set.
Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
liked plans, goals, timescales. That way I could see how far ahead or behind I was in my schedule for the life I had planned out. Except that hadn’t really worked. I was always behind, and every time I’d looked at my five, ten and fifteen year plan I had a burst of anxiety because I wasn’t on schedule and it had fuelled me into working even harder, taking on more, in the hope that this job or that contact would propel me into my neatly mapped out future. But it hadn’t.
Maxine Morrey (Things Are Looking Up)
With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar.
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer)
With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar. The players demanded to know how U.S. Soccer could justify skipping the tournaments. Flynn replied that it was “the technical director’s recommendation” to play a lighter schedule. The technical director? April Heinrichs. The players wanted to figure out if Heinrichs really believed the team should play so few games in 2005, so Julie Foudy reached out to her. “Is that true? Did you tell U.S. Soccer we should only play five games?” Foudy asked. “I never said anything like that,” Heinrichs told her. “I told them you should play 20 games.” If Heinrichs hadn’t recommended such a sparse schedule and, in fact, recommended around 20 games, it seemed that U.S. Soccer was making a decision that went against what was best for the players. The players saw a clear double standard—the men’s team hadn’t played so few games since 1987, almost two decades earlier. They concluded U.S. Soccer’s real reason was the same one behind most disputes between the players and the federation: money. The federation, it appeared, did not want to spend the money for training camps, player stipends, and travel for overseas competitions, even as it was sitting on a $30 million surplus at the time. “In 2005, they had no plans for us and wanted us to go quiet so they didn’t have to pay us the entire year,” says defender Kate Markgraf.
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer)
It’s just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it's ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are 'naturals' at computer programming".
Grace Hopper
In 2017, with oil and gas vanishing from its business, Ørsted took its new name in honor of the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism. Two years later, Anders Eldrup’s “impossible” 85/15 plan was achieved. It hadn’t taken a generation; it had taken ten years.[42] Again that was better than expected and a full fifteen years ahead of schedule, unheard of for conventional Big Energy projects. Over the same ten years, the percentage of Denmark’s electricity generated by fossil fuels fell from 72 percent to 24 percent, while the share contributed by wind power soared from 18 percent to 56 percent.[43] Some days, Danish wind turbines produce more electricity than the country can consume. The surplus is exported to neighboring nations.
Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between)
THE WEBSITE FOR SSA Marine says, “Accelerating the Pace of Business.” Its terminal is now giving off a deafening whir: engine sounds, horns, beeps, and the echoes of workers shouting. The giant cranes lift containers off the ship, sliding them inward fast enough that they swing a little bit in midair. Currently, the bay is full of the haze-lightened silhouettes of container ships, players in that sprawling, fractal network whose workings have recently come to the fore in headlines about the supply chain. In the restored marsh along the park, clusters of migrating shorebirds are keeping their own schedule. It’s currently three hours from high tide, and on the shrinking islands, tiny sandpipers sit together so densely that they look like a tessellated pattern. Stalking around them are a variety of spidery birds, including long-billed curlews, which have surreal curved beaks more than half the length of their entire bodies. They are back for the time being, having traveled northeast to breed—possibly as far as Idaho—and in the meantime, they adjust their activities to the tides. On the one hand, it is true that you can see multiple forms of time here. The containers pile up; the shorebirds probe the mud; the phoebe chases its flies; a small, brown mushroom pushes up from the grass; and the tide continues to rise. Your stomach rumbles. But one of these clocks is not like the others. In order to maintain its equilibrium, it has to run ahead faster and faster.
Jenny Odell (Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture)
I don’t want to play for the New York Stars, and I’m definitely being pushed toward it by my agent and Paddy, but the only reason I went ahead with the deal is because you’re there. Maybe I won’t need this journal anymore. Maybe I’ll be able to talk to the real deal. Maybe I can fast-forward our schedule by a few years.
G.A. Mazurke (End Game (New York Stars, #1))
Living is a like waiting for a bus, with no posted schedule, that comes once every day. You're not waiting for #168, you're waiting for happiness. Sometimes you catch the bus, but it never takes you as far as you want to go, as far as you need to go. What good is a five minute ride when you have eight hours ahead? If anything, the ride pisses you off; you're zooming at seventy miles an hour, comfortable, air-conditioned and laid-back, when suddenly you get kicked out, into the blazing sun, to carry your heavy backpack the rest of the way. The bus can drop you off at indifference, insignificance, loneliness, anxiety, anger, or depression. Some three-hundred pound thug kicks you off and lets another wanderer on. You walk for hours with an aching back, sweating like a pig, hopeless and helpless, and all the while you're thinking, god damn, this would have taken 20 minutes on the bus. You whine and moan hoping someone will lend a helping hand, hoping someone will reach out to you and save you, but everyone only has trite, meaningless expressions to give. Let me clear up a common misconception: you will never help anybody by telling them to "feel better." "Feel better" isn't an air-conditioned ride. What happens when you arrive, eight hours later, at the end of the road? I don't know either. I doubt you ever get there.
Byron Bernstein
There should only be good surprises in a board meeting—We’ve exceeded our numbers! We’re ahead of schedule! Check out this cool demo! Everything else should be a known quantity. It’s best not to debate new discussion items in the boardroom—there’s just never enough time to cover them in detail and get to a resolution. It always goes nowhere.
Tony Fadell (Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making)
Researchers today suggest that the spread of cell phones has been accompanied by a more relaxed attitude toward punctuality inasmuch as people can call ahead and apologize in advance for lateness. But the deeper reason is the decline of the assembly line. Assembly lines require synchronized work, so that if one worker is late it slows down all the others on the line. It requires a level of punctuality little known in agrarian societies. Today, with more free agents, more individuals working on all different schedules, time is more important, but exact punctuality matters less.
Alvin Toffler (Revolutionary Wealth)
It all began the previous summer, when Ted Lindsay visited Marquette Branch Prison as part of a promotional tour with GM Jack Adams. The star winger got along well with the prison’s inmates, and the warden issued an invitation: Come back in the winter for a friendly game. Adams accepted, and on February 2, 1954, the Red Wings arrived to face a pickup team of convicts, surrounded by guard towers and razor wire. Needless to say, there was significant concern over the safety of those involved, and the potential for acts of serious violence. But once the inmates were assured that Gordie Howe would try to keep his elbows down, the game went ahead as scheduled.
Sean McIndoe (The "Down Goes Brown" History of the NHL: The World's Most Beautiful Sport, the World's Most Ridiculous League)
The Boston-born and Los Angeles–raised son of a labor organizer, McCarthy had the soul of a radical and the mind of a scientist. He had graduated high school two years ahead of schedule and earned degrees from Cal Tech and Princeton before joining the faculty of Dartmouth. Of the many scholars entranced by the computer’s potential to imitate and complement the human brain, McCarthy was the one who in 1955 put a name to the phenomenon and the field of research that rose around it: “artificial intelligence.
Margaret O'Mara (The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America)
Raising Junior, a domestic comedy, has as its chief claim to fame discovery of Walter Tetley as a major radio character actor. According to the legend, collaborator Ray Knight snatched Tetley, then 9, off an elevator and thrust him before the microphone when the child scheduled to play Bobby failed to arrive. Tetley, of course, went on to thousands of radio broadcasts (an estimated 2,300 appearances on 150 separate series by the late 1930s, with the bulk of his work still ahead), specializing in wiseguy kid roles on The Fred Allen Show, Easy Aces, The Great Gildersleeve, and The Phil Harris/Alice Faye Show.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
My goal was to be out of the airlock early - my philosophy is that for complicated jobs, if you aren't ahead of schedule, you're already behind.
Scot Kelly
But before it came to that, the show needed a quizmaster, an adult who, like Clifton Fadiman on Information, Please, gave it exactly the right edge. This chair was as vital to the show’s success as were the young panelists. A pair of college professors auditioned: they were too impressed with themselves, giving the kids no time to talk. A candidate from the lecture circuit gave away half the answers. Among the 20-odd people who auditioned was Joe Kelly, a thirdgrade dropout, seasoned vaudevillian, and host of the hayseed music show The National Barn Dance. “His height of intellectual polish before The Quiz Kids was to ring a cowbell and chortle, ‘I’m teakettled pink to be here,’” wrote John Lear in the Saturday Evening Post. Kelly was far from dumb: he had finished third grade a year ahead of schedule but at age 8 had gone into show business.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
A project manager is the captain of the ship, the person responsible for making sure the project is on course and moving ahead smoothly. He or she is in charge of the schedule, and the allocation of money. But most of all, the project manager is responsible for maintaining relationships with the people providing the funds.
Rob Manning (Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer)
By the time the Copenhagen conference kicked off in December, it seemed that my worst fears were coming to pass. Domestically, we were still waiting for the Senate to schedule a vote on cap-and-trade legislation, and in Europe, the treaty dialogue had hit an early deadlock. We’d sent Hillary and Todd ahead of me to try to drum up support for our proposed interim agreement, and over the phone, they described a chaotic scene, with the Chinese and other BRICS leaders dug in on their position, the Europeans frustrated with both us and the Chinese, the poorer countries clamoring for more financial assistance, Danish and U.N. organizers feeling overwhelmed, and the environmental groups in attendance despairing over what increasingly looked like a dumpster fire. Given the strong odor of imminent failure, not to mention the fact that I was still busy trying to get other critical legislation through Congress before the Christmas recess, Rahm and Axe questioned whether I should even make the trip. Despite my misgivings, I decided that even a slight possibility of corralling other leaders into an international agreement overrode the fallout from a likely failure. To make the trip more palatable, Alyssa Mastromonaco came up with a skinnied-down schedule that had me flying to Copenhagen after a full day in the Oval and spending about ten hours on the ground—just enough time to deliver a speech and conduct a few bilateral meetings with heads of state—before turning around and heading home. Still, it’s fair to say that as I boarded Air Force One for the red-eye across the Atlantic, I was less than enthusiastic. Settling into one of the plane’s fat leather conference-room chairs, I ordered a tumbler of vodka in the hope that it would help me get a few hours’ sleep and watched Marvin fiddle with the controls of the big-screen TV in search of a basketball game. “Has anyone ever considered,” I said, “the amount of carbon dioxide I’m releasing into the atmosphere as a result of these trips to Europe? I’m pretty sure that between the planes, the helicopters, and the motorcades, I’ve got the biggest carbon footprint of any single person on the whole goddamn planet.” “Huh,” Marvin said. “That’s probably right.” He found the game we were looking for, turned up the sound, then added, “You might not want to mention that in your speech tomorrow.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
She grinned and flipped ahead to schedule a Bill Murray movie marathon. See? Even in the most organized life there is room for whimsy. It just needs scheduling. As her heroine Monica Geller would say, Rules help control the fun.
Abbi Waxman (The Bookish Life of Nina Hill)
break?" She stared back at him, but speaking was beyond her. She was so taken aback by the concern and care he couldn't hide. This was just one more aspect of his personality that she was seeing, whether he wanted her to see it or not. She sucked in a ragged breath. She had one thought and one thought only. She was falling in love with the Neanderthal. **** During the evening and night, Logan fed her soup and made her drink Gatorade and lots of water. Lauren knew he'd called someone, she suspected it was his mother, because she'd heard him talking on the phone. After that, he timed her medicine and alternated between giving her ibuprofen and acetaminophen. He took care of her, and she left any worries she might have had to him. Since the following day was Friday, she already knew she wasn't going in to work, and so did her immediate boss. It had been more than obvious when Lauren had left with chills and a fever and he had called out, "See you Monday." She knew he didn't want her spreading what she had all over the office. So Lauren alternated between sleeping through the evening and night, and being taken care of by Logan. All she had to do on her own was pick her way to the bathroom, and a couple of times, she hadn't even had to do that. He'd lifted her up when she'd swayed a little too much for his liking, and deposited her in the bathroom and closed the door. He'd been there waiting for her, ready to carry her back after she opened the door. They watched some television together, and at about midnight, he carried her through to the bedroom and held her as she slept. Lauren couldn't ever remember having had so much fun being sick. She reveled in his care; she luxuriated in the undivided attention he was showing her. Nothing anyone had ever done for her had ever felt so . . . compelling. The next morning when she realized that he wasn't going to go to work, she rebelled against that. "I'm okay. I'm going to live. Please go to work." He frowned in obvious agitation. "Your fever might flare up again." "I just took the ibuprofen. I'll take some more meds in a couple of hours, okay?" He watched her as if debating the idea. "I think you still need me." God, yes, she needed him. "I'll be fine." She watched him warily, a thousand emotions bouncing around in her head. "You can come back after work if you want." He leaned in and kissed her on the forehead. "That's a given, baby." **** Lauren went back to work on Monday but was slow to fully get her strength back. Two weeks later, however, she was full steam ahead. She'd laid low at work, put a lot of stuff on the back burner as she recovered from what she guessed was a mild case of the flu. Then one day, feeling much better, she took a look at her upcoming calendar and almost flipped out. She had a full schedule packed into the next ten days or so, starting with an out of town trip. Logan took her out to dinner that evening, and after they'd eaten and she'd delayed as long as she could, she lowered the boom on him. After she told him about the trip, he turned in his seat to stare down at her. He said nothing for a moment, as if not trusting himself to speak. The waiter walked by, and Logan motioned for the check with a jerk of his hand. Every motion of his body indicated his heightened stress level. "Logan, you're overreacting," Lauren chided softly. "Am I?" he asked, staring across the restaurant, out the windows, looking everywhere else but not at her while he drummed his fingers on the table. "Yes. It's no big deal, really, I'll be home before you know it," she tried to soothe. "I don't think you understand," he said flatly as he turned to look at her. Oh, Lauren was pretty sure she did understand and told him so in no uncertain terms. "I
Lynda Chance (Pursuit)
If you refer to me as a Sparrow ever again, your own midlife crisis will arrive ahead of schedule.
Jason Matthews (The Kremlin's Candidate (Red Sparrow Trilogy, #3))
Self-discipline and commitment are character traits that will decide whether you do what you said you would do and go through with it starting by making a schedule and sticking to it or planning your days ahead.
Marc Reklau (The Productivity Revolution: Control your time and get things done! (Change your habits, change your life Book 2))
The #1 reason I love time travel? Easy. Sleeping in. Go ahead and schedule that meeting for 6am. I’ll be there well-rested, sometime after I’ve finished lunch.” -Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1998
Nathan Van Coops (The Warp Clock (In Times Like These, #4))
PUNCTUALITY RULES Being punctual to meetings and appointments not only reduces time wasting but is also a powerful way to demonstrate your respect for other people’s time. Do plan ahead by setting reminders in your calendar. Do arrive a few minutes early to meetings and appointments. Don’t start meetings late for late arrivals. Don’t derail your schedule by coming out late from meetings. If the meeting is running long, excuse yourself. Do be vigilant about being on time to appointments with your superiors. Don’t assume your team members know the importance of punctuality. Remind them frequently that punctuality increases productivity and reduces stress in the department. Be particularly vigilant about respecting your boss’s time, even if he is constantly wasting yours.
John Hoover (Best Practices: Time Management: Set Priorities to Get the Right Things Done (Collins Best Practices Series))
The list of intended features was long and seemingly unrealistic for a team so fatigued by the past years’ effort—but they all sounded like good ideas. The producer’s schedule was a bit ambitious, but the September 15 deadline was the first hard date the team had ever discussed…however, we still couldn’t tell if we were near the top of the mountain or if there was yet another rise over the ridge. One thing was true: We were exhausted and sick of WoW. We worked on it all day, played the test on weekends, and talked about it over every lunch and dinner. When we talked to someone outside the company, it was often the only topic of conversation they were interested in. It was decided for the last two weeks of February the team would work only forty hours a week—late nights would return again in March. But some were working those hours anyway. For the most part, morale was low among half of the employees. Some were doubting that our workload would subside after shipping, because there would be so many bugs to fix and pressure to create more content. With the game still unfinished, and with the imminent expansions and live updates ahead, we were beginning to wonder if we were ever going to reach a conclusion. The team’s spirits were somewhat buoyed by the enthusiasm of the design staff, who were coming in to work on weekends. But even the designers agreed that they never wanted to work on another MMO. They were just too hard and too risky, and took too much time and effort to make.
John Staats (The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development)
While other novelists were worrying about money and struggling to turn in chapters overdue at their publishers, Trollope was prospering and remaining ahead of schedule. While one of his novels was being serialized, he usually had at least one other completed novel, often two or three, awaiting publication.
Roy F. Baumeister (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength)
If your Dentist La Jolla suggests that you just undergo a root planing process, that should outcome in smoother gums plus a healthier, cleaner mouth. You are going to expertise pretty tiny - if any - discomfort, and your mouth will be rid of hazardous bacteria and gingivitis, a gum disease that could sooner or later bring about the loosening of teeth. As long as this disease is caught in time, a cosmetic dentist can repair any harm that could have already been carried out. Root planing, the method of removing any infection that may well be within the teeth and smoothing the surfaces of roots, is usually confused with yet another process known as scaling. Scaling may be the approach of cleaning tartar which has accumulated on a patient's teeth. Typically, scaling and root planing are performed at the same time. It can be very significant that gingivitis is treated as quickly as possible ahead of inflammation works its way as well far toward the base of one's teeth. If this occurs, bacteria may cause a terrific deal of damage, breaking down the structure of a tooth towards the point that it becomes loose. If that damage is too terrific, the method is irreversible. Even so, the procedure might be halted or even reversed if caught early enough. When a cosmetic dentist performs root planing, she or he could numb the region to be treated to lower discomfort. This could include things like either an anesthetic that may be injected, or possibly a topical anesthetic gel that is applied to the pockets of gums. You won't experience any numbing of your tongue or lips, as might be the case with an injection. You'll find some situations where no sort of anesthetic is needed at all, for example when an infection has not developed also deeply in the gums. The only sensation you would really feel will be scraping as the area is smoothed and cleaned. When the surface is planned and totally free of tartar, this makes it possible for the gum tissues to heel and reattach towards the root surface. A cosmetic dentist normally performs this process in the course of four distinct appointments, a single for every quadrant with the mouth. She or he may, by way of example, choose to work around the upper correct side of one's mouth 1st, after which schedule separate appointments for the other areas. You'll find instances, even so, where a patient may perhaps undergo two cleanings, exactly where the upper half of your mouth is worked on first, after which the reduced half is cleaned. After your process, your teeth may possibly be a little more sensitive to temperature for a brief whilst and you could knowledge some temporary bleeding. It is actually rare that patients have any sort of substantial pain, but your cosmetic dentist can prescribe medication if that is certainly the case. In most instances, over-the-counter medicines can simply look after any discomfort that could happen.
The way a Plastic Dentist Functions Root Planing
Umm, yes, the stock market crashes, layoffs happen, injuries happen, illness happen.  That’s part of the game. You need to build your life so you can weather these types of events. Build safeguards so you’re okay even if the market crashes (no excessive leverage), even if you get laid off (savings + be in demand for your skill among good people), you get injured (have some cross-training ability and switch sports for a bit while healing), or illness (be ahead of schedule, not behind/frantic, so things don’t all break when setbacks occur). 
Sebastian Marshall (PROGRESSION)
Those of you who are ruled by endless schedules: Begin to change one thing that is moveable, and then do ask us for help. We can see your path ahead, and we know your true nature and the possible future that awaits you. We will be able to plant seeds and ideas if you are able to quiet the mind and disempower the ego, even just a little. We will hint at a place, a person, or a thing to investigate, perhaps a book or a resting place that will help on the journey to your true self. So take our advice and replace shopping with rest, TV with education, and driving off aimlessly with a lovely hike on a hilltop. These are simple remedies that will save you money and suffering, and indeed you will thank us after the initial anxiety of change attacks the mind. So do not listen to these fears; they are the ego telling tales of starvation and failure. You cannot fail. You are a holy child of God, loved beyond your comprehension, and all will flow to you that you need to grow and achieve the peace along which bliss flows.
Tina L Spalding (Making Love to God: The Path to Divine Sex)
A day before the scheduled departure, Captains Kobzar and Zhuravin received another jolt. It was an even more drastic deviation from operational protocol than being rushed back into service ahead of schedule. The submarine’s crew roster had already been filled with replacements, and they had been introduced to the section officers they would serve. Since these replacements were from other submarines stationed at the base, they were quickly integrated into the regular crew. The new men were assigned to their duty sections, shifts, and bunk schedules. With the replacements, all work assignments were covered for the upcoming mission. Then, without explanation, eleven strangers, all in the uniforms of Soviet sailors, showed up at the pier where K-129 was berthed. They carried written orders to join the crew. The latecomers, including nine in the uniform of common seamen and one wearing the insignia of a seaman first class, were led by a chief petty officer. The chief produced orders assigning this squad to duty aboard Kobzar’s submarine as temporary replacements for his furloughed key senior enlisted men. These last-minute assignments were especially unusual, because their numbers raised the crew total to ninety-eight, fifteen over the normal complement of eighty-three men.
Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)