Quotes to help you be more productive

Type “How to be more productive at work” (without the quotes) into Google search and you will be presented with over 600 million results in less than one second. 

Every success-oriented person on the planet desires to be more productive. We all enjoy the satisfaction that comes from achieving our goals and checking off the items on our to-do lists.

If you are like most of the professionals that we work with (and you are 😀) you have consumed a lot of information on the subject. Maybe you have also tried a few productivity apps and productivity techniques.

But you will still have days when you find that you are slacking off for no apparent reason other than a lack of motivation.

On such days, what you need is not more information. Instead, you need a dose of inspiration to fire up your spirit and help you to be more productive. These 40 quotes will serve that purpose. 

Think about each quote and bookmark this page so that you can easily come back to it as often as you need to.

40 quotes that will inspire you to be more productive

1. You can’t get much done in life, if you only work on days you feel good. – Jerry West

2. If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way. – Napoleon Hill

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

4. Good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Til your good is better and your better is best. – St. Jerome

5. Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

6. It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about? – Henry David Thoreau

7. Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. – Thomas A. Edison

8. It always seems impossible until it’s done. – Nelson Mandela

9. With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts. – Eleanor Roosevelt

10. Productivity isn’t about being a workhouse, keeping busy, or burning the midnight oil. It’s more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time – Gary Keller

11. A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. – George S. Patton

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

13. Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. If you are not willing to risk the unusual you will have to settle for the ordinary. – Jim Rohn

14. If you believe in yourself and have dedication and pride, and never quit, you’ll be a winner. The price of victory is high but so are the rewards. – Bear Bryant

15. You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. – Zig Ziglar

16. Let us realize that: the privilege to work is a gift, the power to work is a blessing, the love of work is success! – David O. McKay

17. Don’t join an easy crowd; you won’t grow. Go where the expectations and the demand to perform are high. – Jim Rohn

18. Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite. – Eleanor Roosevelt

19. You don’t need more time in your day. You need to decide. – Seth Godin

20. What you do today, can improve all your tomorrows. – Author Unknown

21. A year from now, you will wish you had started today. – Karen Lamb

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

23. The way to get started is to stop talking. – Walt Disney

24. Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way. – Booker T. Washington 

25. Smart people focus on the right things – Jensen Huang

26. Profitability comes from loyalty, productivity, and having a character base from which to work. – Zig Ziglar

27. Nothing will work unless you do. – Maya Angelou

28. After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. – Nelson Mandela

29. The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. 

30. If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you will never get it done. – Bruce Lee

31. Make no mistake about it. Bad habits are called ‘bad’ for a reason. They kill our productivity and creativity. They slow us down. They hold us back from achieving our goals. And they’re detrimental to our health. – John Rampton

32. 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

33. Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. – Booker T. Washington

34. It is not always that we need to do more, But rather that we need to focus on less. – Nathan W. Morris.

35. The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more. – Jonas Salk

36. Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all. – Peter Drucker.

37. Happiness, the feeling of positivity, really is the foundation of productivity. –Miguel McKelvey

38. Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. – Thomas A. Edison

39. 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

40. Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. – Edmund Burke 

Scheduling priorities helps you to be more productive.
Planning ahead helps you to be more productive.

Bonus

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. – Stephen Covey [Tweet That]

One way to get even more value from these quotes is to identify the ones that you find most inspiring and put them in places where you get to read them frequently. 

For example, you can make some of the quotes into a screensaver for your device or a handy printout that you can paste on your door and review from time to time.

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