Quotes About Productivity

There is always more to do than you can do, and you can do only one thing at a time. The key is to feel as good about what you're not doing as about what you are doing at that moment. Time

the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all.

When a culture adopts "What's the next action?" as a standard operating query, there's an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.

Keep everything in your head or out of your head. If it's in between, you won't trust either one.

This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. —Kerry Gleeson

Getting things done requires two basic components: defining (1) what "done" means (outcome) and (2) what "doing" looks like (action). And these are far from self-evident for most people about most things that have their attention.

three different kinds of activities you can be engaged in: Doing predefined work Doing work as it shows up Defining your work Doing

Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection tool, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through. Second

of listings for volumes that offer advice on how to improve your work habits, your health, your productivity, and your overall success in life. Some of what they say is typically dressed-up common sense. A fraction of it is baloney. Much of it is worth reading one time, if that

You must use your mind to get things off your mind. An

The number of coulds, shoulds, might-want-tos, and ought-tos they generate in their minds are way out beyond what they have recorded anywhere else. Many

No software, seminar, cool notebook, smartphone, or even personal mission statement will give you more than twenty-four hours in a day

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. —Nadia Boulanger

It's a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on. And it only adds to your anxiety about what you should be doing and aren't. Most

Here's how I define "stuff": anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined what, exactly, it means to you, with the desired outcome and the next action step.

1  |  Every open loop must be in your capture system and out of your head. 2  |  You must have as few capturing buckets as you can get by with. 3  |  You must empty them regularly.

something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: • you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcome is; • you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or • you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust.

We need to transform all the "stuff" we've attracted and accumulated into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information. Almost

The reason most organizing systems haven't worked for most people is that they haven't yet transformed all the stuff they're trying to organize. As long as it's still stuff, it's not controllable.

You increase your productivity and creativity exponentially when you think about the right things at the right time and have the tools to capture your value-added thinking.

The vast majority of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of unclear things;

The vast majority of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of unclear things; they haven't yet realized how much and what they need to organize in order to get the real payoff. They need to gather everything that requires thinking about and then do that thinking if their organizational efforts are to be successful. The

You need no new skills to increase your productivity—just a new set of behaviors about when and where to apply them.

Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action.