Quotes about Being Productive
“Some problems lend themselves to reexamination. A second, third or even fourth thought is productive, because our initial impulses might not reflect our best effort at understanding the nuances of the situation. But many problems simply create more thoughts, without productive output. As we confront something that is unlikely to have a simple or productive way forward, it’s easy to go into a mental tizzy imagining solutions. The art is understanding which sort of problem we’re facing. And devoting the right amount of thought (not less and definitely not more) to the situation we’re in. Spending cycles on categorizing the problem is probably more productive than wasting time on problems that don’t deserve our effort.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“Pushing your way through some critical choices now will probably pay off in far more good days later. How many good days later does hard decision work today earn us? Stalling costs us more than we expect. We get stressed from the act of stalling, and then later, we will have to pay the ongoing cost of putting off work and decisions that would have been easier and more profitable a while ago.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“If, every time there’s a dish in the sink, you load and run the dishwasher and scrub the entire kitchen, you’re never going to get anything else done. On the other hand, if you wait until the sink is overflowing and the kitchen is filthy before you work on it, you’re going to spend a lot of time living with a dirty kitchen. Somewhere in between the two extremes is a productive steady state. The same goes for your relationship with a customer, your staffing decisions and just about everything else we do all day. Setting the triggers for action is best done in advance, and maintained regularly. Waiting for a crisis is expensive and risky.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is eliminate the task. Downsize. The rooms you don’t have, don’t need to be cleaned. Donate. The items you don’t own, don’t need to be organized. Delete. The projects you don’t take on, don’t need to be finished. Is this a problem that needs to be solved? Or is it a problem that can be eliminated all together?”
James Clear, Blog
“Accomplished people have an obsession with completing tasks. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave, almost compulsively, to finish it. […] It’s this constant stream of finishing that begins, over time, to unlock more and more interesting opportunities and eventually leads to their big scores.”
Cal Newport
“I started dividing my to-do list into 1) things I have to do, 2) things I want to do, and 3) things other people want me to do. Life changing! I often don’t get to #3 and I finally realized… this is what it means to have boundaries.”
Jenée Desmond-Harris, Twitter
“The mind and the body are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate out their effects on us. Feeling energized influences our mood, which influences our work in very direct ways. And feeling confused or disorganized in our work can have a terrible effect on us physically as well.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 97)
“Slowing down enables you to act in a high quality way. Kind rather than curt. Polished rather than sloppy. It’s hard to be thoughtful when you’re in a rush.”
James Clear, Blog
“If you’re feeling creative, do the errands tomorrow. If you’re fit and healthy, take a day to go surfing. When inspiration strikes, write it down. The calendar belongs to everyone else. Their schedule isn’t your schedule unless it helps you get where you’re going.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“Anything that must yet be done, virtue can do with courage and promptness. For anyone would call it a sign of foolishness for one to undertake a task with a lazy and begrudging spirit, or to push the body in one direction and the mind in another, to be torn apart by wildly divergent impulses.”
Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 259)
“What are the chances that the busiest person you know is actually the most productive? We tend to associate busyness with goodness and believe that spending many hours at work should be rewarded. Instead, evaluate what you are doing, why you are doing it, and where accomplishing it will take you. If you don’t have a good answer, then stop.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 164)
“If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail. And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse. Like so many things, the order is not optional. And yet, we often do the least-scary or easiest parts first, regardless of what the order of operations tells us.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“There’s no one way—there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”
Bernard Malamud, via Daily Rituals (Page 233)
“I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.”
John Updike, via Daily Rituals (Page 195) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜