Despite more tools and technology — productivity can still be a struggle to achieve in work and in life. Work/life balance can be illusive and hard to achieve — let alone to maintain.
Every thought, emotion, introspection and life event has to be dealt with — all while working towards gaining your work/life balance.
In order to move forward in your life and work — to be able to keep the hardworking heroics going everyday — leave the sad events to their proper perspective — hail the happy events at the top of mind, and maybe keep a childlike silliness still in your soul — it helps to have potent productivity hacks and quotes at the ready.
Here are 50 top quotes on productivity that can help inspire you to accomplish more:
- “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” – Francis Of Assisi
- “One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we’re idling in front of our computer screens.” – Joshua Foer
- “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King
- “It’s not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.” – Nathan W. Morris
- “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
- “The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” – Thomas Sowell
- “Understanding your employee’s perspective can go a long way towards increasing productivity and happiness.” – Kathryn Minshew
- “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
- “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
- “Gentleness doesn’t get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.” – Coco Chanel
- “Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.” – Stephen Hawking
- “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. 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
- “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed” – Peter Drucker
- “The productivity of a workgroup seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization.”– Ken Blanchard
- “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” — Bruce Lee
- “Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” – Paul J. Meyer
- “When you waste a moment, you have killed it in a sense, squandering an irreplaceable opportunity. But when you use the moment properly, filling it with purpose and productivity, it lives on forever.” – Menachem Mendel Schneerson
- “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” — David Allen
- “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” — Alexander Graham Bell
- “Early rising not only gives us more life in the same number of years, but adds, likewise, to their number; and not only enables us to enjoy more of existence in the same time, but increases also the measure.” – Caleb C. Colton
- “The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.” – Mitch Kapor
- “In a society that judges self-worth on productivity, it’s no wonder we fall prey to the misconception that the more we do, the more we’re worth” – Ellen Sue Stern
- “The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.” – Thomas J. Peters
- “Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.” – Franz Kafka
- “If you have time to whine, then you have time to find solution.” — Dee Dee Artner
- “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today.” — Nolan Bushnell
- “Being mindful of our energy and the energy of others can help us to lead a happier, more productive life.” — Akiroq Brost
- “It is not enough to be busy… The question is: what are we busy about?” — Henry David Thoreau
- “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” — Stephen Covey
- “The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.” — Timothy Ferriss
- “You don’t need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.” — Seth Godin
- “A worker without genius is better than a genius who won’t work.” — Leopold Auer
- “Start doing something, you’ll continue.. why? Because motivation doesn’t cause action. Action causes motivation.” — Neil Pasricha
- “Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.” — Caterina Fake
- “It’s surprising how much free time and productivity you gain when you lose the busyness in your mind.” — Brittany Burgunder
- “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Find a way to get started in less than two minutes.” — James Clear
- “Passion is a fuel to run your engine in order to give more productivity.” — Myra Yadav
- “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
- “Never mistake motion for action.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “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
- “If you want to double your productively, shorten the timeline to by 50%.” — Richie Norton
- “What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50%.” — Susan Cain
- “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” – Dale Carnegie
- “Make each day your masterpiece.” – John Wooden
- “Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.” – Alan Watts
- “The individual who says it is not possible should move out of the way of those doing it.” – Tricia Cunningham
- “I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn’t sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time–but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was “productive.” Time spent with my family and friends was never wasted.” — Gretchen Rubin
- “Light tomorrow with today.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- “When we simplify, we are attending to our minds. Clear minds lead to creativity, vision, health, and productivity.” — Angela Lynne Craig
- “Either you run the day or the day runs you” — Alice Glyn
John Rampton
John’s goal in life is to make people’s lives much more productive. Upping productivity allows us to spend more time doing the things we enjoy most. John was recently recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine as being one of the top marketers in the World. John is co-founder and CEO of Calendar.