Quotes About Productivity

It should cause no surprise that anyone so lazy as myself should be economical to the point of miserliness with everything he writes.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

I don't actually have to think very hard when I'm writing. I mean, there are times where it's a task, and you have to plug away and plug away. But then there are times when a song writes itself in 15 minutes, and you're just struggling to keep up with it.

I've never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

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

Louis Braille created the code of raised dots for reading and writing that bears his name and brings literacy, independence, and productivity to the blind.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

I think Mozart, with all his impatience in writing, would have loved it. It would have allowed him to write twice as much. He would have loved a Mac. If he'd had a laptop, he would have been unstoppable.

For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.

I always want to be doing something - going somewhere, doing a project, teaching a class, writing an article. I try to use up my day. You have a limited time on this planet - try to use as much of it as you can for productive purposes.

S]tudies show that one of the best ways to lift your mood is to engineer an easy success, such as tackling a long-delayed chore.

How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.

There's a great satisfaction in knowing that we've made good use of our days, that we've lived up to our expectations of ourselves.

We won't make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people's habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.

How about this," I suggested. "Instead of feeling that you've blown the day and thinking, 'I'll get back on track tomorrow,' try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big.

Nothing is more exhausting than the task that's never started.

Nothing is more exhausting than the task that's never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.

The happiest, healthiest, most productive people aren't those from a particular Tendency, but rather they're the people who have figured out how to harness the strengths of their Tendency, counteract the weaknesses, and build the lives that work for them.

I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time--but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was productive. Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted.

One of the biggest wastes of time is doing something well that didn't need to be done at all.

Just because we're busy doesn't mean we're being productive. Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.

Contemporary research shows that happy people are more altruistic, more productive, more helpful, more likable, more creative, more resilient, more interested in others, friendlier, and healthier. Happy people make better friends, colleagues, and citizens.