Productivity Quotes

Successful people make right decisions early and manage those decisions daily.

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer.

Have a bias toward action - let's see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.

Trouble Springs From Idleness.

I make myself a bowl of instant oatmeal, and then I don't do anything for an hour. Why do I need the instant oatmeal? I could get the regular oatmeal and feel productive.

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

Every day you spend drifting away from your goals is a waste not only of that day, but also of the additional day it takes to regain lost ground.

Rise early, that by habit it may become familiar, agreeable, healthy, and profitable.

Understand the difference between being at work and working.

Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

Don't mistake movement for achievement. It's easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?

Let us be content to work To do the things we can, and not presume To fret because it's little.

Time properly invested is worth a fortune.

One either meets or one works.

Discipline yourself to do the things you need to do when you need to do them, and the day will come when you will be able to do the things you want to do when you want to do them!

It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

In the decade ahead I can predict that we will provide over twice the productivity improvement that we provided in the '90s.

We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

The more you think, the more time you have.

Knowledge is power, which is why people who had it in the past often tried to make a secret of it. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not from hiding it.

Good intentions are useless until they are expressed in appropriate action!

I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done.

When you break goal into increment and start controlling your time, things begin to happen.

If you were your own employer, would you be entirely satisfied with the day’s work you have done today?

I call that man idle who might be better employed.

As long as your intentions are solid and about growth and progression and being productive and not being idle, then you're doing good in my book.

I'm obsessed with packing in as much work as possible during each day, simply because there is only so much time you have in a lifetime. There is nothing better than to go home at night and know that you've done everything that you could do to accomplish your work.

You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.

An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

I'm at my most productive before I even have my first cup of coffee. I only get slower and stupider as the day progresses.

Time can be an ally or an enemy. What it becomes depends entirely upon you, your goals, and your determination to use every available minute.

Too many people spend more time planning how to get the job than on how to become productive and successful in that job.

Every piece of work in the shops moves. Save 10 steps a day for each of the 12,000 employees, and you will have saved 50 miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.

Lists today are a way of trying to get through the day, because we are losing a sense of time.

Method will teach you to win time.

If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

While the worriers are worrying, the planners are planning and the accountants are figuring out why we can't afford it, I'm busy getting started.

Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength... It is wisdom to take occasional furlough. In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less.

A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.

Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic.

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

Be a busy person. People who are active are often much more at peace with themselves than those who are inactive and inert.

We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness.

A productive and happy life is not something you find; it is something you make.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

Everything is easy when you are busy. But nothing is easy when you are lazy.

Every blade of grass is a study; and to produce two, where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure.

I get lots of ideas when the lights go out at night and it gets very quiet. Sometimes they come when I first lie down to sleep; other times I wake up with an idea racing through my mind. But regardless of when an idea comes, I have made it a habit to get out of bed and write the idea down before it disappears into my dreams. You should do the same.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.

My advice is to never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.

Success depends on how many experiments you can fit into 24 hours

It's energy intensification, where we essentially have, through our light bulbs and cars, the manpower of [hundreds of] people working on our behalf, helping our food being created, helping our materials like steel and plastic and wood and paper be created. Our lifestyles are incredibly energy intense.

It’s not about how much you sleep. It’s what you do while you’re awake.

More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.

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

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.