Quotes About Productivity

Just what do we tax under our current system? Work, that's what. Hard work and productivity. The harder you work, the more you achieve. The more you achieve, the more you're taxed. To make matters worse, under our "progressive" income tax system, the harder you work, the more severe the punishment actually is!

Our marvelous electronic devices can seduce us into believing we are hard at work, but we are merely sending and receiving insignificant messages, while the real work goes undone, day after day, week after week, year after year. Real thinking and grappling hurt like hell. That's why so many people avoid it like a root canal.

I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I'm afraid I'll stutter.

I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I'm afraid I'll stutter.

There's a myth that time is money. In fact, time is more precious than money. It's a nonrenewable resource. Once you've spent it, and if you've spent it badly, it's gone forever.

Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.

The Now Habit perspective does not accept that laziness, disorganization, or any other character defect is the reason you procrastinate.

The healthy individual has an appetite for fruitful activity and for a high quality of life. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The fear of judgment is the key fear that stems from over-identifying who you are, your worth as a person, with your work. From this fear follows the counterproductive drive toward perfectionism, severe self-criticism, and the fear that you must deprive yourself of leisure time in order to satisfy some unseen judge.

The typical procrastinator completes most assignments on time, but the pressure of doing work at the last minute causes unnecessary anxiety and diminishes the quality of the end result.

Procrastination is not the cause of our problems with accomplishing tasks; it is an attempt to resolve a variety of underlying issues.

It [the Now Habit program] cuts through the crippling assumptions of the Puritan work ethic—that your production determines your worth—and the negative Freudian views of human drives—that a "lower self" must be subdued and disciplined by society. By giving you the tools to create inner safety and positive inner dialogue, it helps you to lessen the fear of being imperfect and enables you to take risks and start sooner.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Thomas Jefferson. . . knew what schools were for--to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. . . It would not have come easily to the mind of such a man, as it does to political leaders today, that the young should be taught to read exclusively for the purpose of increasing their economic productivity.

Why waste yourself doing something pointless, when you can spend your life being productive in your own eyes?

What's the use of being given a load of manure if you don't spread it around?

No matter who you are, your progress and success in life will depend, more than any other factor, on how you invest the twenty-four hours you're blessed with each day.

You can't make more time, only better choices.

While directing your energy toward "making things fair" is often counterproductive, channeling your spiritual, mental, and physical energy toward achieving meaningful goals is a constructive investment of time.

When our brain is overtaxed, we find "distractions more distracting.

Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no," says Grafman. "The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem." You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

Intensive multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy," commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research.