Quotes About Productivity

Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.

In daytime, they're doing 50-60 pages a day, whereas nighttime, you do seven or eight.

I can very much enjoy taking a year off. Whereas some people would feel crippled by that, I can feel enlarged by it. And then I also like to work nonstop, maybe for a year-and-a-half, and then take a year off.

Wherever I am, I start my day, it's the same. I'm not an early bird. I'm not waking up at five o'clock, six o'clock; it's usually seven-thirty, eight o'clock, and I will then read the newspapers, emails from around the world and make phone calls.

My two must-haves are my cell phone and my MacBook Pro laptop, which allows me to update my Web site from wherever I am, whether I'm in Africa or in Sun Valley skiing.

I - I try to do as much as I can, wherever I am. So, at the farm, I'm always thinking of some new project, some new thing I can do.

The notions of going to work, putting in set hours, and getting 'face time' are increasingly antiquated ideas. Because of technology we have entered a modern era of work where we can work from wherever we want, whenever we want and we can be more productive and make greater contributions than ever before.

I think if I'm guilty of anything, I'm guilty of always being incredibly focused on the task at hand. So wherever I've worked, I've just always tried to do my best, achieve my best, build a great team around me.

I think it's important to have flexibility to work wherever is best for you. I actually encourage people to work at the cafe - or from home or wherever works best for them.

I'm an everyday guy - I'm a try-to-write-at-least-15-minutes-every-day-if-not-an-hour-or-two kind of guy. I write in Google docs so that wherever you go, you have access to it.

It's not how many hours you put in with a client or on a project. It's the quantity and quality of your energy - your focus and force - that determine whether that time is valuable.

If you want to be more productive, then start at the start: get there on time. Whether it is a meeting, a flight, an appointment or a date, it's important to ensure you are there when you say you will be there. This may feel like an old-fashioned tip to give, but it has served me well for five decades in business.

I am so busy doing nothing... that the idea of doing anything - which as you know, always leads to something - cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

I'd better make hay while the sun shines.

While ignoring your bad habits may help you feel good initially, that avoidance will eventually catch up to you. When you don't address the unproductive and unhealthy things you're doing alongside your good habits, you'll stagnate.

Procrastination comes in two types. Some of us procrastinate in order to pursue restful activities - spending time in bed, watching TV - while others delay difficult or unpleasant tasks in favor of those that are more fun.

It seems like we wake up and it's a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, 'What the hell am I doing?'

When you're travelling, your day is jam-packed. I just don't have time to whip out a PC all the time. But I can whip out a BlackBerry and tweet. I keep a constant diary of where I'm at and why I'm there.

But there's a little guy who sits astride my brain with a whip, and if I'm away from the machine for more than a couple of hours during the day, this little guy's lashing away.

I hear that 5 o'clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I'm also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.

I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.

If things are going well, if the writing's coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled.

Where in the world have you seen construction people who do everything on time, with good quality and at minimal prices? Just give me one country like that. A country like that doesn't exist in the world, you know. There's not one such country anywhere in the world.