101 Quotes on Productivity

Here are some quotes about time management and productivity that are worth remembering.

Time Management & Productivity

1. “How often do you find yourself saying, “In a minute”, “I’ll get to it” or “Tomorrow’s good enough” and every other possible excuse in the book? Compare it with how often you decide it’s got to be done, so let’s get on and do it! That should tell you just how serious your procrastinating problem really is.”

~Stephen Richards, The Secret of Getting Started: Strategies to Triumph over Procrastination

2. “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

~Yale Richmond, Understanding the Americans: A Handbook for Visitors to the United States

3. “To have more peace, as well as more time, start by letting go of the notion that time can be manipulated. Then, let go of the idea that it confines you. Instead, set out to use the time that is there for its true and best purpose — as the space within which you can live your life to the fullest.”

~Michelle Passoff

4. “You don’t get time. You create time.”

~Sanhita Baruah

5. “Value your time poorly, and you will be poor. When time is wasted as a lifestyle choice, you will be stranded in places you don’t want to be.

Take a look around. How do your friends, family, and peers value their time? Are they standing in line to save four bucks? Are they driving 40 minutes to save 10 dollars? Are they parked on the sofa anxiously waiting to see who wins Dancing with the Stars?”

~M.J. DeMarco, The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!

6. “Learn to make time and everything else will follow.”

~Haresh Sippy

7. “The secret of success in life is time rightly used.”

~Sivananda Saraswati

8. “What you do with your time on a daily basis determines what values will be added to your life.”

~Sunday Adelaja

9. “Success is determined by how best you can utilize your time.”

~Sunday Adelaja

10. “Time utilization and effectiveness is a major marker for success.”

~Sunday Adelaja

11. “Time is the single most important resource that we have. Every single minute we lose is never coming back.”

~Tarun Sharma

12. “Always spend your time adding value to your life.”

~Sunday Adelaja

13. “You’ve got little time on earth, make each day count.”

~Sunday Adelaja

14. “Time is a running factor; once it goes, it cannot be reclaimed.”

~Sunday Adelaja

15. “Understanding the value of time is understanding the true essence of life.”

~Sunday Adelaja

16. “You can’t stop time, but you can stop wasting it.”

~Craig D. Lounsbrough

17. “Time flies and never falls down.”

~Tamerlan Kuzgov

18. “The best honor you can give to anyone is to show respect for their time.”

~Geoffrey Ocaya

19. “If the scarcity of time is the reason for not learning, we first need to learn how to manage our time.”

~Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

20. “It’s not about having more time; it’s about maximizing the time you already have.”

~Rob Liano

21. “Though part of the puzzle is obviously capital budget allocations, most companies seem to have a much higher awareness of the rules by which capital and assets are allocated than they do about how skilled people should be spending their time.”

~Rita Gunther McGrath, The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty

22. “You and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters — twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less.”

~Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone

23. “Your mission, goals, and objectives should be aligned with your present actions and where you see yourself in the future.”

~Germany Kent

24. “Invest your time because you cannot save it.”

~Amr Okasha

25. “Time is one of the free resources, the choice is yours, you either waste it or use it Effectively.”

~Anath Lee Wales, Your Life can be Changed: The True Guide to Become a Change Maker!

26. “If you want to go big in the business world, you need to have the right product at the right time.”

~Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail: Unscrew Yourself from Business Failure

27. “Time is the only treasure I have on earth.”

~Mitta Xinindlu

28. “It’s amazing the amount of achievements someone can accomplish by managing well the gift called 24 hours.”

~Manuel Corazzari

29. “Invest your time because you cannot save it.”

~Amr Okasha

30. “Productivity is purposeful doing. It is paying attention to your intention to ensure that what you’re doing is worth your time and energy. Will the outcome be worth your investment?”

~Melissa Steginus, Self Care at Work: How to Reduce Stress, Boost Productivity, and Do More of What Matters

31. “The time management is in your control, if you will manage it properly, it can create enormous opportunities.”

~Fahim Khan

32. “Time management is all about distinguishing between what is important for you and what simply lures you into useless activities.”

~Dr Prem Jagyasi

33. “Productivity is directly proportional to your ability to eliminate unnecessarily.”

~Sukant Ratnakar, Open the Windows

34. “Productivity means fewer efforts in returns of more output.”

~Sukant Ratnakar, Open the Windows

35. “Do it immediately. Do it imperfectly. Winners do it now.”

~Monroe Mann, Time Zen: Aka Winners Do It Now — The Shortest and Most Effective Time Management and Success System Ever Created.

36. “Time has wings and it can fly. A second spent wastefully can never be regained, a minute spent wisely is memorable, and an hour spent well becomes a history.”

~Adewale Osunsakin, Time to Awake Christian Magazine

37. “Irony of the Fact:

Half of our time we waste, thinking how to manage our time.”

~Sachin Panwar

38. “It’s not knowing what to do; it’s doing what you know.”

~Tony Robbins

39. “You don’t need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.”

~Seth Godin

40. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

~Walt Disney

41. “Action is the foundational key to all success.”

~Pablo Picasso

42. “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

~Stephen Covey

43. “Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”

~Paul J. Meyer

44. “Start by doing what is necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

~Saint Francis of Assisi

45. “The key to productivity is to rotate your avoidance techniques.”

~Shannon Wheeler

46. “Work hard, have fun, and make history.”

~Jeff Bezos

47. “Productivity is the deliberate, strategic investment of your time, talent, intelligence, energy, resources, and opportunities in a manner calculated to move you measurably closer to meaningful goals.”

~Dan S. Kennedy

48. “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.”

~Dale Carnegie

49. “What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.”

~Susan Cain

50. “Create with the heart; build with the mind.”

~Criss Jami

51. “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

52. “Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year — and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!”

~Tony Robbins

53. “Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent, and not enough time on what is important.”

~Steven Covey

54. “The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”

~Michael Altshuler

55. “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”

~Abraham Lincoln

56. “You can’t get much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.”

~Jerry West

57. “Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

58. “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

~David Allen

59. “Create with the heart; build with the mind.”

~Criss Jami, Killosophy

60. “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”

~Peter Drucker

61. “The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.”

~Thomas J. Peters

62. “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

~Albert Einstein

63. “The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.”

~Henry David Thoreau

64. “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.”

~George Lorimer

65. “Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.”

~Lou Holtz.

66. “Lost time is never found again.”

~Benjamin Franklin

67. “You don’t need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.”

~Seth Godin

68. “Your daily choices and actions should be rational and productive.”

~Sunday Adelaja

69. “Long-range planning works best in the short term.”

~Doug Evelyn

70. “Never mistake motion for action.”

~Ernest Hemingway

71. “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”

~Muhammad Ali

72. “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.”

~Peter Drucker

73. “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”

~Herb Kelleher

74. “You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know.

Knowing is not enough! You must take action.”

~Tony Robbins

75. “If there are nine rabbits on the ground, if you want to catch one, just focus on one.”

~Jack Ma

76. “Ordinary people think merely of spending time, great people think of using it.”

~Arthur Schopenhauer

77. “Great acts are made up of small deeds.”

~Lao Tzu.

78. “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers, you cannot be successful or happy.”

~Norman Vincent Peale

79. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

~Elon Musk

80. “People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don’t really believe in it, then they are not going to really work hard.”

~Mark Zuckerberg

81. “The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.”

~Sergey Brin

82. “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

~George Bernard Shaw

83. “Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all those things effectively, you can’t miss.”

~Lee Iacocca

84. “There is no substitute for hard work.”

~Thomas Edison

85. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

86. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

~Thomas Edison

87. “Don’t confuse the urgent with the important.”

~Preston Ni

88. “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”

~Napoleon Hill

89. “In life, people tend to wait for good things to come to them. And by waiting, they miss out.”

~Neil Strauss

90. “Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!”

~Tim Ferriss

91. “If you don’t have daily objectives, you qualify as a dreamer.”

~Zig Ziglar

92. “Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you.

Exhaustion affects your quality and productivity.”

~Jeff VanderMeer

93. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

~Steven King.

94. “There is never enough time to do it right, but there is always enough time to do it over.”

~John W. Bergman.

95. “Just do it!”

~Shia LaBeouf.

96. “To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.”

~Goethe

97. “Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.”

~Sam Levenson

98. “All our productivity, leverage, and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it. The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less.”

~Seth Godin

99. “It’s not always that we need to do more, but rather that we need to focus on less.”

~Nathan W. Morris

100. “Productivity is to create asymmetrical situations where your one good input creates many good outputs.”

~Richie Norton

101. “Passion is the spark that put you on fire for combustion and propel the wheels of productivity that brings your ultimate success.”

~Lord Robin