Time Management Quotes

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans.

Don't start the day until you have it finished. Don't start the week until you have it finished. Don't start the month until you have it finished. Plan your day.

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.

Take five minutes to centre yourself in the morning...set your intention every day...if you don't have five minutes, you don't deserve to have the life of your dreams.

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

Do not waste your time with people who have shown you they really mean no good for you.

Those who every morning plan the transactions of the day and follow out that plan carry a thread that will guide them through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of their time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all their occupations. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, chaos will soon reign.

It's amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.

If something can be done 80% as well by someone else, delegate!

You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine.

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

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

Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year - and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

Most misfortunes are the results of misused time.

It is in quiet that our best ideas occur to us. Don't make the mistake of believing that by a frantic kind of dashing around you are being your most effective and efficient self. Don't assume that you are wasting time when you take time out for thought.

The greatest embarrassment of my political career has been that active duties seem to deprive me of time for careful investigation. I seem almost obliged to form conclusions from impressions instead of from study.... I wish that I had more knowledge, more thorough acquaintance, with the matters involved.

Look At The Clock When You Are Sitting idle. But Never Look At The Clock When You Are Working.

Learn how to separate the majors and the minors. A lot of people don't do well simply because they major in minor things.

First of my own personal requirements is inner calm. This, I think, is an essential. One of the secrets of using your time well is to gain a certain ability to maintain peace within yourself so that much can go on around you and you can stay calm inside.

Some people you can afford to spend a few minutes with, but not a few hours.

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.

If I had more time, I would have written less.

Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.

Lose the day loitering, 'twill be the same story To-morrow, and the next more dilatory, For indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or think you can, begin it! Only engage, and then the mind grows heated; Begin it, and the work will be completed.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.

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.

Spend your time and energy creating, not criticizing.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

Lose no time; be always employed in something useful.

I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.

Every minute you spend in your life is either spent bringing you closer to your goals or moving you away from your goals.

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

Wilson was once asked how long it took him to write a speech. He answered, 'That depends. If I am to speak 10 minutes, I need a week for preparation. If 15 minutes, 3 days. If half hour, two days. If an hour, I am ready now.'

Unpunctuality is a vile habit.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

We have time enough if we but use it aright

If you want to improve how you manage time - stop doing what doesn't need to be done!

Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life... so love what you do. Your time is limited. Don't waste it.

A man who does nothing never has time to do anything

We always have time enough, if we will but use it aright.

Nothing separates successful people from unsuccessful people more than how they use their time!

If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time.

If you don't have time to invest in a goals program is it possible that you don't have time because you don't have a goals program?

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

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.

Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!

Did you know there's a difference between being busy and being fruitful? Did you ever stop to think that just being busy - running around in circles all day but not accomplishing anything - is the same as wasting your time? It's frustrating to expend so much energy and time and not have any fruit from your effort!

Avoiding the phrase 'I don't have time...', will soon help you to realize that you do have the time needed for just about anything you choose to accomplish in life.

I'm going to be very happy, and then do everything I have time to do after that.

Stop doing things that waste time. Don't replace time with your family or things that you need to do. I needed to put together two fantasy teams this weekend because that's something I enjoy, but I did stop playing Nintendo Wii for hours on end.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

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.

Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long.... This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.

Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.

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.

Leisure is the time for doing something useful.