Productivity Quotes

Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.

An organization cannot increase its productivity-but people can!

People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.

The man who can master his time can master nearly anything.

Action will destroy your procrastination.

Successful people are decisive people. When opportunities come their way, they evaluate them carefully, make a decision, and take appropriate action. They know that indecision wastes time that could be spent on more productive tasks.

You can be effective in this world without stress.

What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.

To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.

It is not the hours of practice that matter...it's what you put into the hours that counts.

Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.

I usually get up at 3 A.M. I don't require a lot of sleep, and if I get tired, I'll take a powernap during the day.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

Meetings are places where dead ideas rise from their graves and eat the brains of the living.

You should never go to a meeting or make a telephone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.

Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.

It is opposition that makes us productive.

Don't mistake movement for achievement.

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work - work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

Plan you work and work your plan.

Isn't it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?

Those who work much do not work hard.

Time is the best kept secret of the rich.

Success in your work, the finding a better method, the better understanding that insures the better performing is hat and coat, is food and wine, is fire and horse and health and holiday. At least, I find that any success in my work has the effect on my spirits of all these.

Develop a sense of urgency in your life.

There is a great need for a new approach, new methods and new tools in teaching, man's oldest and most reactionary craft. There is great need for a rapid increase in the productivity of learning. There is, above all, great need for methods that will make the teacher effective and multiply his or her efforts and competence. Teaching is, in fact, the only traditional craft in which we have not yet fashioned the tools that make an ordinary person capable of superior performance. In this respect, teaching is far behind medicine, where the tools first became available a century or more ago.

He that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night.

Knowledge applied is productivity.

Genius has no taste for weaving sand.

There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.

Try is a noisy way of doing nothing.

Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.

Being productive gives people a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that loafing never can.

If you want to kill time why not try working it to death.

Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it and spend it rather than invest it.

Sometimes when I'm under pressure, if I think somebody is expecting stuff from me, I'll do better than if I was just left on my own. I can sit down - I'm a skilled writer, I've been doing it all my life - and I can get down to it.

An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.

The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

The American worker is more productive than he's ever been.

Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life.

You don't get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

Waste not a day in vain digression; with resolute, courageous trust seek every possible impression and make it firmly your posession you'll then work on because you must.

If you want something done, ask a busy person.

Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.

The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be, as Poor Richard says, “the greatest prodigality'; since, as he elsewhere tells us, 'Lost time is never found again'; and 'What we call time enough always proves little enough'. Let us then up and be doing, and doing to the purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity.

Half finished work generally proves to be labor lost.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.

Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

The best way to deal with procrastination is to postpone it.

Order - Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

If you don't plan your time, someone else will help you waste it.

The way to do a great deal is to keep on doing a little. The way to do nothing at all is to be continually resolving that you will do everything.

If you continually ask yourself, "What's important now?", you won't waste time on the trivial.