Selected productivity quotes

1. Action is the parent of results; dormancy, the brooding mother of discontent.

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

3. Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

4. Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

5. Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

6. Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

7. Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.

8. I could do great things, if I weren't so busy doing little things.

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

10. My time is far too valuable for me to spend any of it trying to improve myself.

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

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

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

14. 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.

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

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

17. 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.

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

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

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

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

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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...

25. 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.

26. Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

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

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

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

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

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

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

36. 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.

37. Write a page a day. It will add up.

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

39. 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.

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

41. What is the point of spending such huge sums to bring a 200-lb.-body downtown when all you want of it is its eight-and-a-half pound brain?

42. Just as I was starting on my journey the idea came to me for a new symphony, this time with a program, but a program which will remain an enigma to all- let them guess it who can. It will be called 'A Programmatic Symphony' (No. 6). During my trip, while composing in my mind, I frequently shed tears. When I got home I settled down to sketch it, and the work went so furiously that I had the first movement completely ready in less than four days and the remaining movements are already clearly outlined in my head. Half the third movement is already done. There will be much innovation of form in this symphony- and incidentally, the finale will not be a noisy allegro but, on the contrary, a long drawn-out adagio. You can't imagine what bliss I feel, being convinced that my time is not yet passed and I can still work. Perhaps, of course, I'm mistaken, but I don't think so.

43. Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life.

44. When you are solving a problem, don't worry. Now, after you have solved the problem, then that's the time to worry.

45. When objectives are superb, the toils to reach them must be ignored.

46. There is no method in his talk: he wanders like a man sailing among many currents, whithersoever his lazy mind directs him; and, what is more unpleasant, he preaches, or rather soliloquises:I reckon him a man of great and useless genius: a strange, not at all a great man.

47. Speaking much also is a sign of vanity; for he that is lavish in words is a niggard in deeds.

48. Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself--either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.

49. Atque etiam recordatus quondam super cenam, quod nihil cuiquam toto die praestitisset, memorabilem illam meritoque laudatam vocem edidit: 'Amici, diem perdidi.'

50. Too many people want to have written.

51. The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them...

52. 'A man who was always taking two irons out of the fire and putting three in'

53. Endeavor to do well with everything you undertake.

54. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off unnecessary actions.

55. This was a good week's labour.

56. Have you summoned your wits from wool-gathering?

57. 'Personal density,' Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemunde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, 'is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.' 'Temporal bandwidth,' is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar '? t' considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

58. It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules.

59. Ignavum, fucos, pecus a praesepibus arcent.

60. Great problems call for many small solutions.

61. A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism.

62. You will no longer believe that you 'don't count.' You will know and advocate your knowledge that you are the bearer of human society. Don't run away. Don't be afraid. It is not so terrible to be the responsible bearer of human society. Inflated leaders would have no soldiers and no arms if you clearly knew, and stood up for your knowledge, that a field has to yield wheat and a factory furniture or shoes, and not arms.

63. Without pressure, the work doesn't get done at all.

64. The maxim 'nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter: PARALYSIS.

65. All I had to do was do it.

66. 'Direction Creates TIME...Motivation creates ENERGY'

67. When eating an elephant take one at a time.

68. There is time enough for everything, in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.

69. I spent this time polishing up the software/hardware documentation, renaming registers to be more meaningful. This was actually time well spent in my life.

70. procrastination is the art of keeping<up with yesterday

71. Some of us don't suffer from completion anxiety

72. ...throughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive. ...our word 'school'--and its equivalent in all European languages--derives from a Greek word meaning 'leisure.' -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)

73. Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

74. I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

75. Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

76. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

77. I'm sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have time to make it shorter.

78. But exceed! exceed!

79. But what about speed?

80. Go to work on an egg.

81. Why organize it!

82. Do not say, 'when I have leisure I will study,' for you may never have leisure.

83. There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it.

84. Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

85. A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

86. Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.

87. Do nothing by halves Which can be done by quarters.

88. Well, boys, you have done your work, now you may go and play - if you don't fall out among yourselves.

89. A imaginacao foi a companheira de toda a minha existencia, viva, rapida, inquieta, alguma vez timida e amiga de empacar, as mais delas capaz de engolir campanhas e campanhas, correndo.

90. His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen it through.

91. Be positive and vigorous

92. Pile it high and deep.

93. 'People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily.' Zig Ziglar

94. Accustom yourself to tireless activity...

95. What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

96. It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

97. The Lord gave us two ends-one to sit on and the other to think with. Success depends on which one we use the most.

98. Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

99. Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

100. Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.