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Quotes About Priorities

What do I like about my schedule? What would I like to spend more time doing? What would I like to spend less time doing? How can I make that happen?
~ Laura Vanderkam
if you were offered $400 million to never do the stuff of your work again, would you be bummed about it, despite your riches? If you would, then it's time to ask a follow-up question. If you did land a windfall, and could still do the stuff of your job, what parts of your job would you change? Given that you'd never have to work a day in your life, what would you do more of and what would you shove off your plate?
~ Laura Vanderkam
Work was all I did, and I realized that was upsetting." It was upsetting philosophically—there is more to life—but it also felt financially foolish. "I live in New York City. If all I was doing was working, I could do that from anywhere. I could do that from a shack in the middle of the desert," she says. "Why pay to live in one of the world's most expensive cities if I wasn't taking advantage of it?
~ Laura Vanderkam
Just as an outdoor graduation ceremony needs its own specific rain date, the most important activities in your life need specific back-up slots. That said, creating specific back-up slots can get unwieldy as the priorities stack up. We also don't always know, during Friday planning, everything we'll need to do by the end of the next week. So here's a practical shortcut for this rule: Get in the habit of leaving regularly scheduled open space in your schedule. That
~ Laura Vanderkam
What makes you happy when it comes to money? Write these categories down and keep them in your wallet, or wherever you pay bills.
~ Laura Vanderkam
We keep our houses somewhat clean, but not as clean as we did in 1965, when stay-at-home moms spent, on average, 37.4 hours per week spiffing up their abodes (and married moms overall, including employed ones, spent 34.5 hours on such chores).
~ Laura Vanderkam
Sometimes the answers are profound—for example, win a Nobel Prize—and sometimes they're more basic, such as "cook dinner for my family two nights per week.
~ Laura Vanderkam
I feel like I spend much of my energy some days convincing the younger people in my house to go to bed so I can go to bed. There is always something else that has to happen. The toddler wants to be rocked again. Someone else's homework must go in the backpack. Someone has forgotten to tell me something very important, some story that takes meandering minutes
~ Laura Vanderkam
Laura Vanderkam
~ open to being
You can have a great system for organizing e-mail, or scheduling daily conference calls on various projects, but I'm guessing at your retirement dinner, people won't talk about your pristine in-box or packed schedule. They'll want to talk about what you've done. If you're not getting anything that matters done—like, say, lowering Vietnam's infant mortality rate—then you're not really working.
~ Laura Vanderkam
No roll in the hay is worth losing what I've got.
~ Laura Wiess
What's the point of obsessing over cholesterol or bike helmets or even cigarettes when the biggest threats to our children are being released back into society every day?
~ Laura Wiess
Everyone know that you should never wreck your life for a boy, and especially not one that you meet while you're in high school. Seriously, everyone knows it. You never hear someone say, "Oh, wow, you're seventeen and you really like him? That's great, you should do whatever it takes to get him, even if it means wrecking your whole like.
~ Lauren Barnholdt
Everyone knows that you should never wreck your life for a boy, and especially not one that you meet while you're in high school.
~ Lauren Barnholdt
Like I need to play on the Wii when you're there willing to f*** me. Video games are what men invented to fill the sex void. Any man who chooses video games over sex deserves to live in his mother's basement with his mint-condition, in box Star Wars figurines and his real doll.
~ Lauren Dane
This is the hill you want to die on? Really? A we-can-be-just-friends speech?
~ Lauren Dane
It's not like they could have done it if he'd been following his dick around like it found him water." "A dowsing dick?" Audra asked.
~ Lauren Dane
Ellie tells me, often, some variation on this theme: that I am a little too invested in how I'm feeling about church and God, and perhaps not invested enough in how I am serving church, God, neighbor.
~ Lauren F. Winner
While I very much wanted to be in a relationship, I didn't want to be in the wrong one.
~ Lauren Graham
I don't spend much money on clothes I never did.
~ Lauren Hutton
Charlie...I can't go out with you if I'm in love with someone else. Even if he no longer wants me.
~ Lauren Myracle
I found the guy! After more than twenty years of being single and jerked around and cheated on and alone, I found my soul mate. Pardon my French, but you think I give a shit about the flowers?
~ Lauren Weisberger
Unfortunately, there is no rule saying a city must be a nice place to live in order to attract fast population and economic growth. Parks, good governance, and smoothly flowing traffic are optional, not required. Sometimes cities grow at an astonishing rate, despite being hell on Earth.
~ Laurence C. Smith
It's better to have loved and lost than to have to do forty pounds of laundry a week.
~ Laurence J. Peter