Quote

Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.

Tom Hodgkinson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Thinking
Break
Hey
Targets
Life
Start
Target
Aimed
Working
List
Kicked
Goal
Lists
Guru
Forget
Goals
Beating
Often
Management
Avoided
Best
Rules
Reduce
Presto
Think
General
Followed
Gurus

More quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

Image
Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
When walking you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
I've never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don't understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
Tom Hodgkinson
Image
Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing.
Tom Hodgkinson