Quotes About Productivity

No matter how savvy you are with your Day Planner and Google Calendar, if you really want to do it all, chances are you'll need some help.

To illustrate, let's try this thought experiment: Tell yourself, "I'm going to make three sales calls today." How does it feel? Most likely, it feels pretty "meh." Now, tell yourself, "I'm going to make 50 sales calls today." Which are you more excited to do?

Schedule blocks of time in your calendar for your D-I-A Desires, and then fit in other to-dos around those blocks.

The abundance of work presses hard on the smallness of time.

Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn't leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.

I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.

I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.

Finishing something is nearly always a herculean effort; bringing a job to completion requires resolve. People would be surprised to learn that most of the stuff out in the world is only a small percentage of what could have been accomplished.

There isn't a single day I don't do some writing -- if you don't, you won't have a book. When you're self-employed it is very easy to burn away your time instead -- answering e-mails, surfing the Internet, or hanging out with friends. You really must have the discipline to sit down and write every day. Most of what I am writing is living in the back of my head or in my subconscious. I find if I write every day, my subconscious will do the job for me.

I am a slow worker, but I could have written at least two books more in the time that I have been obliged to spend waiting around public offices and in the back yards of recruiting stations—waiting unnecessarily for unnecessary things.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

I am picky about the books I read. I don't waste time on head trash. I think Benjamin Disraeli said it best, "When I want to read a good book I write one.

I'm a big believer in putting things off, In fact, I even put off procrastinating. -Ella Varner

It was like there's got to be some way to stay working and stay productive in Los Angeles. TV is that kind of thing for an actor. Unless you get stuck in one of these shows where you have to go to Vancouver.

Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you'll start thinking waaay outside the box.

Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time.

Now, the external work of man is of the most varied kind as regards the force or ease, the form and rapidity, of the motions used on it, and the kind of work produced.

That business of relaxation, which is so terribly modern today, is all good and well, but my work interests me so much, and is so varied, that many times it seems relaxing when I go from one aspect to another.

When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.

I have no trouble with my sleep, but the amount I have varies from four to eight hours, depending on my schedule.

For a variety of reasons, we are not producing at a given level of economic activity the jobs we used to have.

A variety of national and international studies indicate that the broad-based deployment of information technology can have a substantial impact on our nation's economic productivity and growth as well as the educational and social success of our citizens.

I like to work on a number of things simultaneously. If you're working on a variety of projects and if you get stuck on one of them, you can move to another without grinding your gears indefinitely.