101 Powerful Productivity Quotes That Will Inspire You To Work Harder and Smarter

We all want to be more productive. You can’t just wish to become a productive person — and have it suddenly happen. It takes time, discipline, and motivation.

What if you have no discipline? What if you are not motivated? Time is in short supply — is time ever not in short supply?

Turn to these 101 powerful productivity quotes. Keep your mind in the right place with thoughts that will inspire you to work harder and smarter.

You have to keep your mind in the right place to boost your productivity. Meditate on a couple of these quotes each day and see if you can boost productivity.

1. “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

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

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

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

5. “If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress” — Barack Obama

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

7. “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

8. “If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.” — Benjamin Franklin

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

10. “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. — Francis Of Assisi

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

12. “It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”— Henry David Thoreau

13. “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

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

15. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started” — Mark Twain

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

17. “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” — Albert Einstein

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

19. “The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can’t do.” — Dennis Waitley

20. “Make each day your masterpiece.”— John Wooden

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

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

23. “You’ve gotta keep control of your time and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.” — Warren Buffett

24. “Don’t count the days. Make the days count.” — Muhammad Ali

25. “The moment I let myself get overwhelmed, it all becomes more stressful. It helps to ask, ‘What’s the worst thing that happens if I don’t answer this email?’ I have a schedule. I go, ‘It’s 7 p.m. — I did everything I could today.’ You need a life separate from work.” —Tavi Gevinson

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

27. “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

28. “My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do.” — Francine Jay

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

30. “To think is easy. To act is difficult. Act as one thinks is the most difficult.” — Johann Wolfgang Von Goeth

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

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

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

34. “If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first” — Brian Tracy

35. “And at work I have a rule that you’re not allowed to come into my office unless you’re coming into my office with a solution to a problem, and not (only) with a problem.” — Shonda Rhimes

36. “It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom” — Aristotle

37. “Do something instead of killing time. Because time is killing you.” –Paulo Coelho

38. “Gentleness doesn’t get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.” — Coco Chanel

39. “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker

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

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

42. “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

43. “Never mistake motion for action” — Ernest Hemingway

44. “I’ve accepted my procrastination as part of who I am. As such, I do designate days where I allow time for procrastination.” — Issa Rae

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

46. “Great acts are made up of small deeds.” — Lao Tzu

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

48. “Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions” — John Randolph

49. “If you have time to whine then you have time to find solution.”— Dee Dee Artner

50. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs

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

52. “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

53. “I build in 15-minute breaks so that I can take some quiet time and close on one meeting before I go to the next. I’m a big believer in taking time to pause and reflect, particularly when you’re working on some of the big challenges in the world.” — Melinda Gates

54. “Worrying gets you nowhere. If you turn up worrying about how you’re going to perform, you’ve already lost” — Usain Bolt

55. The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend time feeling sorry for themselves.” — Barbara Corcoran

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

57. “Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” — Earl Nightingale

58. “I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.” — Oprah Winfrey

59. “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” — Herb Kelleher

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

61. “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

62. “You can only do so much. There are five more projects you want to do, but you pick the three that are really going to matter, and you try to do those really well, and you don’t even try to do the others.” — Sheryl Sandberg

63. “Being busy does not always mean real work. 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 Edison

64. “When you try to complete two tasks at once, it’s been proven that neither task is going to get your full attention. Lack of attention leads to problems. Problems lead to things having to be redone. Therefore multitasking can actually increase your workload instead of reducing it.” — Gary Keller

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

66. “Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” — Farrah Gray

67. “Think of many things; do one.” — Portuguese proverb

68. “Someday is not a day of the week.” — Janet Dailey

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

70. “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

71. “Don’t make the same decision twice. Spend time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don’t revisit the issue unnecessarily. If you’re too willing to reopen issues, it interferes not only with your execution but also with your motivation to make a decision in the first place. After all, why bother deciding an issue if it isn’t really decided?” — Bill Gates

72. “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

73. “He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.” — Victor Hugo

74. “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus” — Alexander Graham Bell

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

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

77. “Don’t confuse the urgent with the important.” — Preston Ni

78. “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

79. “I’m just always looking forward. I spend very little time, looking backward.” — Gary Vaynerchuk

80. “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

81. “The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one’s day and every night to examine the results obtained.” — Alexis Carrel

82. “You get to decide where your time goes. You can either spend it moving forward, or you can spend it putting out fires. Decide. And if you don’t decide, others will decide for you.” — Tony Morgan

83. “Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” — Douglas R. Hofstadter

84. “If you don’t have time for the small things, you won’t have time for the big things.” — Richard Branson

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

86. “Your daily choices and actions should be rational and productive.” — Sunday Adelaja

87. “Both good and bad days should end with productivity. You mood affairs should never influence your work.” — Greg Evans

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

89. “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

90. “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

91. “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

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

93. “Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.” — Caterina Fake

94. “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

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

96. “Whoever has tasted the breath of morning knows that the most invigorating and most delightful hours of then day are commonly spent in bed; though it is the evident intention of nature that we should enjoy and profit by them.” — Robert Southey

97. “The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” — Thomas Sowell

98. “If you commit to giving more time than you have to spend, you will constantly be running from time debt collectors.” — Elizabeth Grace Saunders

99. “We don’t manage time, we manage activities within time.” — Bernard Kelvin Clive

100. “Have a clear system for to-dos: whether it’s ‘Getting Things Done’ or the ‘Checklist Manifesto,’ just have a system and stick to it. I have a very specific method I use in Slack and in email that works for me, and knowing I have that system keeps me from feeling overwhelmed even when I’m behind or the to-dos pile up.” — April Underwood

101. “Sometimes conflicts arise no matter how organized you are. That’s just life. The difference between remaining organized and living in chaos is by not addressing those conflicts immediately.” — John Rampton

John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, and startup enthusiast. He is a founder of the calendar productivity tool Calendar. You can sign up for early access to Calendar here! 

This article originally appeared on Calendar.