351 Productivity Quotes

It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.

Our meetings are held to discuss many problems which would never arise if we held fewer meetings.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

I really love the dark of the night. It helps me to concentrate.

It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

To get what you want, STOP doing what isn't working.

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.

I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man's capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy. I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create...

There is another ground of hope that must not be omitted. Let men but think over their infinite expenditure of understanding, time, and means on matters and pursuits of far less use and value; whereof, if but a small part were directed to sound and solid studies, there is no difficulty that might not be overcome.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it.

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

Rise early, that by habit it may become familiar, agreeable, healthy, and profitable. It may, for a while, be irksome to do this, but that will wear off; and the practice will produce a rich harvest forever thereafter; whether in public or private walks of life.

My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty... it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.

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

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

Write a page a day. It will add up.

The dawn speeds a man on his journey, and speeds him too in his work.

An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.

Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

George Dillon: It's easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.

I am always in haste, but never in a hurry.

Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.

Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure.

How lame do you have to be to spend your time like that on the Internet? Can't you do something more constructive, like surf for porn? Or go into the real world and interact with people rather than cyber-sniping.

I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.'

I know that I have my own mission and I know that life, unfortunately, is short. I have a limited time, and we have to get as much done as possible, and that's that. And we have to preserve our health.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

Ambition is the death of thought. (p. 77e)

I do all my best work in bed.

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my Definite Purpose in life, therefore, I DEMAND of myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment, and I here and now promise to render such action.

Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

During the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, growth in manufacturing productivity in the United Kingdom was the lowest of all the seven major industrial countries in the world. During the 1980s, our annual rate of growth of output per head in manufacturing has been the highest of all the seven major industrial countries.

Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

Punctuality is the thief of time.

My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

To do two things at once is to do neither.

Early rising may not be a vice : but it is certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed.

Her crop was a miscellany When all was said and done, A little bit of everything, A great deal of none.

Deliver us from committees.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Anxiety is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. It results from over motivation - leading to errors that lead to an underestimation of one's self. Work out your anxieties on paper and read. This calms the mind.

It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don't care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done.

Those who have least to do are generally the most busy people in the world.

Our tendency is to be interested in something that is growing in the garden, not in the bare soil itself. But if you want to have a good harvest, the most important thing is to make the soil rich and cultivate it well.

I've taken off two months, three months, at a time, and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed.

'I indeed do respect all people for the positives in their life. Sadly, there comes a time of diminishing returns in the balance. At the end of the day, my respect is reserved for those solidly in the asset column of mankind.'

Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature-subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today...The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.

21 piano sonatas, 27 piano concertos, 41 symphonies, 18 masses, 13 operas, 9 oratorios and cantata, 2 ballets, 40 plus concertos for various instruments, string quartets, trios and quintets, violin and piano duets piano quartets, and the songs. This astounding output includes hardly one work less than a masterpiece.

At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.

Lazy people are always looking for something to do.

Bolivar cannot carry double

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:

It's not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs

Mozart shows a creative power of such magnitude that one can virtually say that he tossed out of himself one great masterpiece after another. ~ Claudio Arrau

Simplify, simplify.

Do - don't stew.