100 Powerful Quotes That Will Boost Your Productivity

Everyone wants to be productive, but boosting productivity doesn’t happen by itself.

Sometimes it takes a motivational quote to shift us in the right direction. Here are some powerful thoughts to get you started on a more productive year.

1. “It’s not knowing what to do, it’s doing what you know.” –-Tony Robbins

2. “Focus on being productive instead of busy.” –Tim Ferriss

3. “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” –Stephen Covey

4. “Ordinary people think merely of spending time, great people think of using it.” –Arthur Schopenhauer

5. “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” –David Allen

6. “Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” –Coco Chanel

7. “If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.” –David Allen

8. “Action is the foundational key to all success.” –-Pablo Picasso

9. “Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” –-Paul J. Meyer

10. “The best way out is always through.” –-Robert Frost

11. “It’s not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.” –Nathan W. Morris

12. “Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.” –Franz Kafka

13. “Life is too complicated not to be orderly.” —Martha Stewart

14. “You don’t need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.” –Seth Godin

15. “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

16. “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” –-Peter Drucker

17. “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” –Bruce Lee

18. “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

19. “Great acts are made up of small deeds.” –Lao Tzu

20. “It’s fine to decide not to decide about something. You just need a decide-not-to-decide system to get it off your mind.” –David Allen

21. “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” –Napoleon Hill

22. “It is not enough to be busy…. The question is: What are we busy about?” –Henry David Thoreau

23. “There’s a tendency to mistake preparation for productivity. You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you’ll never be successful.” –Shia LaBeouf

24. “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” –Warren Buffett

25. “When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that in itself is a choice.” –-William James

26. “Effective performance is preceded by painstaking preparation” –Brian Tracy

27. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” –Walt Disney

28. “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

29. “People often remark that I’m pretty lucky. 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

30. “You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.” –Zig Ziglar

31. “Sometimes, things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night.” –Michael Jordan

32. “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

33. “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” –-Dwight D. Eisenhower

34. “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.” –John F. Kennedy

35. “Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.” –Leo Babauta

36. “Live daringly, boldly, fearlessly. Taste the relish to be found in competition–in having put forth the best within you.” –Henry J. Kaiser

37. “The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.” –Tom Peters

38. “If you have time to whine then you have time to find a solution.” –Dee Dee Artner

39. “I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.” —Warren Buffett

40. “No matter how many personal productivity techniques you master, there will always be more to do than you can ever accomplish in the time you have available to you, no matter how much it is.” –-Brian Tracy

41. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” –Stephen King

42. “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

43. “To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.” –Corita Kent

44. “Time is not refundable; use it with intention.” –Unknown

45. “Starve your distraction and feed your focus.” –Unknown

46. “Create with the heart; build with the mind.” –-Criss Jami

47. “Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” –Oprah Winfrey

48. “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

49. “Start by doing what is necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” –-Saint Francis of Assisi

50. “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.” –Zig Ziglar

51. “Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes in a day.” –Denis Waitley

52. “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” –Muhammad Ali

53. “To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

54. “There is no substitute for hard work.” –Thomas Edison

55. “When we truly need to do is often what we most feel like avoiding.” –David Allen

56. “Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.” –Paul Gauguin

57. “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

58. “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 Scheerson

59. “Words may show a man’s wit but actions will show his meaning.” –Benjamin Franklin

60. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” –Martin Luther King

61. “Never mistake motion for action.” –Ernest Hemingway

62. “You don’t get paid for the hour, you get paid for the value you bring to the hour.” –Jim Rohn

63. “Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.” –John Wayne

64. “Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.” –Sam Levenson

65. “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

66. “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

67. “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” –Will Durant

68. “While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.” –-Henry C. Link

69. “Lost time is never found.” –Benjamin Franklin

70. “Don’t confuse activity with productivity. Many people are simply busy being busy.” –Robin Sharma

71. “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

72. “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” –Dale Carnegie

73. “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

74. “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.” –Henry Ford

75. “Sameness leaves us in peace but it is contradiction that makes us productive.” –Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe

76. “Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.” –Gretchen Rubin

77. “Knowledge is the source of wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes innovation.” –Peter Drucker

78. “The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are: hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense.” –Thomas Edison

79. “If you want an easy job to seem mighty hard, just keep putting if off.” –Richard Miller

80. “Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, and carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the ‘someday I’ll’ philosophy.” –Denis Waitley

81. “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” –Calvin Coolidge

82. “Work hard, have fun, and make history.” –Jeff Bezos

83. “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

84. “I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.” –Tim Ferriss

85. “The merit in action lies in finishing it to the end.” –Genghis Khan

86. “There is never enough time to do it right, but there is always enough time to do it over.” –John W. Bergman

87. “Creativity isn’t about wild talent as much as it’s about productivity. To find new ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t. It’s a pure numbers game.” –Robert Sutton

88. “Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. Exhaustion affects your quality and productivity.” –Jeff VanderMeer

89. “Productivity growth, however it occurs, has a disruptive side to it. In the short term, most things that contribute to productivity growth are very painful.” –Janet Yellen

90. “If you want something done, give it to a busy man.” –-Preston Sturges

91. “The key to productivity is to rotate your avoidance techniques.” —Shannon Wheeler

92. “The really happy people are those who have broken the chains of procrastination, those who find satisfaction in doing the job at hand. They’re full of eagerness, zest, productivity. You can be, too.” –– Norman Vincent Peale

93. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” –-Charles Darwin

94. “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

95. “If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” –Thomas Edison

96. Life’s gardeners pluck the weeds and care only for the productive plants.”
–Bryant McGill

97. “The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.”
–Henry David Thoreau

98. “Multitasking is a lie” –Gary Keller

99. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover.” –H. Jackson Brown, Jr​.’s mother

100. “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” –Sir Edmund Hillary