John Perry Quotes

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

— John Perry

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

— John Perry

“Voltaire was a smart cookie.”

— John Perry

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

— John Perry

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

— John Perry

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

— John Perry

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

— John Perry

“While procrastinating is not a flaw, being a structured procrastinator is actually one way of being pretty productive.”

— John Perry

“The essence is that many procrastinators are "structured procrastinators," people who, like me, get a lot done as a way of not working on what they should ideally be working on.”

— John Perry

I was surprised by how many people think of themselves as procrastinators, but, like me, seem to get a lot done anyway.

— John Perry

“Taking a long time to do something not worth doing, that is, doing it inefficiently, seems even more useless.”

— John Perry

“Plan your day with an eye to your tendency to procrastinate, and put in safeguards to keep it to a minimum.”

— John Perry