Why do we love quotes? Well, many of us can be inspired by a quote on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For example, when need to be re-energized when motivation has lost its luster. In addition, using quotes as a guide can help us achieve specific goals.
Whatever reason you tap into the power quotes, the key is to keep them front and center. And, what better place to do that than by adding the following 101 phrases to your calendar for productivity. This way when you review your daily schedule or receive reminders, you’ll also get that much-needed productivity boost when needed.
1. “Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” — Paul J. Meyer
2. “A wind that blows aimlessly is no good to anyone.” — Rick Riordan
3. “Focus on being productive instead of busy.” — Tim Ferriss
4. “Lost time is never found again.” — Benjamin Franklin
5. “It’s not knowing what to do, it’s doing what you know.” –-Tony Robbins
6. “Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.” — David Allen
7. “Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you’ve got to have talent and know-how to use it.” — Frank Sinatra
8. “It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”– Henry David Thoreau
9. “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” — Dale Carnegie
10.. “Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.” — Delmore Schwartz
11. “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.” — Stephen Covey
12. “Action is the foundational key to all success.” — Picasso
13. “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” — Bruce Lee
14. “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” — Theodore Roosevelt
15. “Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.” — Franz Kafka
16. “If there are nine rabbits on the ground, if you want to catch one, just focus on one.” — Jack Ma
17. “Ordinary people think merely of spending time, great people think of using it.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
18. Stressing output is the key to improving productivity while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite. — Paul Gauguin
19. “The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.” — Oprah Winfrey
20. “Life is too complicated not to be orderly.” — Martha Stewart
21. “It’s not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.” — Nathan W. Morris
22. “You may delay, but time will not.” — Benjamin Franklin23 “Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” — Coco Chanel
23. “Don’t confuse the urgent with the important.” — Preston Ni.
24. “The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends, there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” — Thomas A. Edison
25. “The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” — Thomas Sowell
26. “Make each day your masterpiece.”– John Wooden
27. “My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do.” — Francine Jay
28. “The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.” — Benjamin E. Mays
29. “The best way out is always through.” –– Robert Frost
30. “Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.” — Leo Babauta
31. “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker
32. “Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. Exhaustion affects your quality and productivity.” — Jeff VanderMeer
33. “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” — Albert Einstein
34. “Both good and bad days should end with productivity. Your mood affairs should never influence your work.” — Greg Evans
35. “You don’t need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.” — Seth Godin
36. “Saying ‘I don’t have time’ really means ‘it’s not a priority.’ If someone offered you a ton of cash to do whatever you claim you don’t have time for…you’d probably find the time!” — Laura Vanderkam
37. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” — Stephen King
38. “Sometimes the biggest gain in productive energy will come from cleaning the cobwebs, dealing with old business, and clearing the desks—cutting loose debris that’s impeding forward motion.” — David Allen
39. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” — Steve Jobs
40. “When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
41. “Great acts are made up of small deeds.” — Lao Tzu
42. “‘Tomorrow’ is the thing that’s always coming but never arrives. ‘Today’ is the thing that’s already here and never leaves. And because that’s the case, I would much prefer to invest in today than sit around waiting for an arrival that’s not arriving.” — Craig D. Lounsbrough
43. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” — Walt Disney
44. “Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.” — Alan Watts
45. “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” — Muhammad Ali
46. “Time is not refundable; use it with intention.” — Unknown
47. “Effective performance is preceded by painstaking preparation” — Brian Tracy
48. You can’t get much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good. — Jerry West
49. “The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.” — Tom Peters
50. “There is no waste in the world that equals the waste from needless, ill-directed, and ineffective motions.” — Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr.
51. “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” — Herb Kelleher
52. “You don’t get paid for the hour, you get paid for the value you bring to the hour.” — Jim Rohn
53. “You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.” — Zig Ziglar
54. “If you have time to whine then you have time to find solutions.” — Dee Dee Artner
55. “All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.” — Plato
56. “Light tomorrow with today.”– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
57. “Don’t confuse activity with productivity. Many people are simply busy being busy.” — Robin Sharma
58. “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” –– Dwight D. Eisenhower
59. “Busy is a decision” — Debbie Millman
60. “People often say that motivation doesn’t last long. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” — Zig Ziglar
61. “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” — Amelia Earhart
62. “There is never enough time to do it right, but there is always enough time to do it over.” — John W. Bergman
63. “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.” — John F. Kennedy
64. “Just do what works for you because there will always be someone who thinks differently” — Michelle Obama
65. “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus” — Alexander Graham Bell
66. “Every day that I procrastinate, every day that I sit stagnant in fear, every day that I fail to better myself, someone else out there with the same goals and dreams as me is doing the exact opposite.”– Noel DeJesus
67. “Where your attention goes, your time goes” — Idowu Koyenikan
68. “I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.” — Warren Buffett
69. “Pick a problem that hurts enough for enough people and go solve it – execution is much more important than the perfect idea.” — Cristina Junqueira
70. “If you commit to giving more time than you have to spend, you will constantly be running from time debt collectors.” — Elizabeth Grace Saunders
71. “Someday is not a day of the week.” — Janet Dailey
72. “Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.” — Caterina Fake
73. “Reflect on what you do in a day. You may have never realized how some simple, harmless activities rob you of precious time.” — Vivek Naik
74. “Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law” — Douglas R. Hofstadter
75. “A year from now you may wish you had started today.” — Karen Lamb
76. “The key to productivity is to rotate your avoidance techniques.” — Shannon Wheeler
77. “Start by doing what is necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” — Saint Francis of Assisi
78. “Sometimes, things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night.” — Michael Jordan
79. “Long-range planning works best in the short term.”– Doug Evelyn
80. “Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.” — Gretchen Rubin
81. “Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes in a day.” — Denis Waitley
82. “The happier you are, the more productive you will become.” — Chris Bailey
83. “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.” — George Lorimer
84. “Don’t worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue.” — Tom Rath
85. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” — Martin Luther King
86. “Want to be more productive? Uncover the subtle nuances that steal your productivity and fix those.” — Allison Graham
87. “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. It comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” — John Wayne
88. “Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.” — Charles Richards
89. “Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.” — Sam Levenson
90. “Your daily choices and actions should be rational and productive.” — Sunday Adelaja
91. “Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” — Brian Tracy
92. “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
93. “What gets measured gets managed.” — Peter Drucker
94. “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
95. “You don’t need more time in your day. You need to decide.” — Seth Godin
96. “Each minute is a little thing, and yet, with respect to our personal productivity, to manage the minute is the secret of success.” — Joseph B. Wirthlin
97. “Fall in love with the process, and the results will come.” — Eric Thomas
98. “Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves.” — Lord Chesterfield
99. “My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.” — Miles Davis
100. “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” — H. Jackson Brown
101. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
Image Credit: Bich Tran; Pexels; Thank you!
Deanna Ritchie
Editor-in-Chief at Calendar. Former Editor-in-Chief and writer at Startup Grind. Freelance editor at Entrepreneur.com. Deanna loves to help build startups, and guide them to discover the business value of their online content and social media marketing.