A Productive Day Quotes & Sayings

I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. — Maria Semple

Imagination inspires you to look at everything with fresh eyes, as though you had just come forth from a dark tunnel into the light of day. Imagination becomes for you a magic lamp with which to search the darkness of the unknown, that you may discover new goals or chart more productive paths to old goals. — Wilferd Peterson

there are only five simple rules for getting by in the world of work. If you adhere to them, you will be an immense success in life, now and until the day you die. If you do not, you had better hope for a job in the government, join a union, or aspire to fulfill a quota. Here they are: 1. Listen carefully to instructions and never expect to be told anything a second time. 2. Do a complete job, and do it better than your supervisor expects you to do it. 3. Work diligently to the point of discomfort, and without interruption or complaint. 4. Complete all tasks in a timely manner, meaning as soon as possible. 5. If you run out of assigned tasks, look for other jobs to do that help others and the firm. That's it: five rules to a happy, productive job, to a happy, productive life. Do — Jeffrey Tucker

You are fooling yourself whenever you think you are productive just because you have worked fourteen hours in a day. You will be truly productive when you do the same amount of work in four hours, and take the other ten hours to enjoy the good things life has to offer. — Ernie J Zelinski

In between, for five or ten minutes at a stretch, the real version, tense and dishonest and uncertain. I rarely allowed her to emerge for long. Work - all that productive, effective, focused work - kept her distracted and submerged all day. And drink - anesthetizing and constant - kept her too numb to feel at night. — Caroline Knapp

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day. — Elin Hilderbrand

Its all a matter of weeding out the bad and cultivating more productive thoughts. And just like pulling weeds, you have to get to the root otherwise that weed, the self-doubt, that negative programming, will spring back up and shoke off the flower that can blossom for you in the future.Be consistent. Apply that "weed off" whenever you feel the need. Every day see the brighter side of things. Continually tell yourself how lucky you are, how good your life is right now, and how things can only get better — Dave Pelzer

Kelso's hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria - always in the past, his most productive time of day - a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile. — Robert Harris

Things like taking a few dollars out of a paycheck, putting it into savings, and leaving it there. Or doing a few minutes of exercise every day - and not skipping it. Or reading ten pages of an inspiring, educational, life-changing book every day. Or taking a moment to tell someone how much you appreciate them, and doing that consistently, every day, for months and years. Little things that seem insignificant in the doing, yet when compounded over time yield very big results. You could call these "little virtues" or "success habits." I call them simple daily disciplines. Simple productive actions, repeated consistently over time. That, in a nutshell, is the slight edge. — Jeff Olson

Q: Where and when do you do your writing?
A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules ... afternoons are best, but I'm too lethargic for any real regime. When I'm in the flow of something I can do a regular 9 to 5; when I don't know where I'm going with an idea, I'm lucky if I do two hours of productive work. There is nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and then writes 3,000 words a day, or that some other asshole only works half an hour every two weeks, does fifty press-ups and stands on his head before and after the "creative moment." I remember reading that kind of stuff in profiles like this and becoming convinced everything I was doing was wrong. What's the American phrase? If it ain't broke ... — Zadie Smith

These men flocked to the plains, and were rather stimulated than retarded by the danger of an Indian war. This was another potent agency in producing the result we enjoy to-day, in having in so short a time replaced the wild buffaloes by more numerous herds of tame cattle, and by substituting for the useless Indians the intelligent owners of productive farms and cattle-ranches. — William T. Sherman

Every little bit of stress you eliminate contributes to a more productive day. That's not being a diva; it's placing yourself in a situation that allows you to be in optimal form. — Lilly Singh

It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the ravages of her terrible history of early abuse. One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. "You must be Dr. van der Kolk," she said. "My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?" I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting "Jane" and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. — Richard Hamming

The process of doing films is not my favorite, but I love television. Television is a quicker turnaround. You shoot more during the day, which makes me feel more productive. It would be like, 'I did five scenes today and ten pages.' That's television. — Jaime Pressly

I don't typically work that late into the night in a studio, I'm more productive during the day. — Amy Ray

There comes a moment when you know you just aren't going to do anything esle productive for the rest of the day.-T-Shirt — Darynda Jones

A good father believes that he does wisely to encourage enterprise, productive skill, prudent self-denial, and judicious expenditure on the part of his son. — William Graham Sumner

I guess the verdict is in - I am not a sociopath. It's not effective or productive not to be nice. It would undermine the goals I want to achieve on any given day. — Whitney Cummings

Of the twelve, the most powerful questions (to employees, guaging their satisfaction with their employers) are those witha combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes (to include profitability). Armed with this perspective, we now know that the following six ar ethe most powerful questions:
1) Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3) Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4) In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
5) Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6) Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
As a manager, if you want to know what you should do to build a strong and productive workplace, securing 5s to these six questions would be an excellent place to start. — Marcus Buckingham

Every morning when I wake up, I wish the day will be productive. It should be filled with good things like writing something worth the thought, helping people, or even carrying out simple deeds like flashing a friendly smile to everyone. Well, why bother doing all these? It's because I keep telling myself to never underestimate the power of virtue, no matter how small it seems, it can make a difference. — Aishah Madadiy

Increase Your Productivity We live in a demanding and distracting world. Being productive can sometimes feel like an impossible feat. Here are three ways to get more done without burning out: Keep one to-do list. Include everything you want or need to do in one place. Writing it down helps get it off your mind and leaves you free to focus on the task at hand. Do the most important thing first. Before you leave work in the evening, decide what one thing you need to accomplish the next day. Do it first thing in the morning, when you're likely to have the most energy and fewest distractions. Schedule time for non-urgent things. It's easy to get caught up in the pressing issues of the day. Block off time in your calendar to do things that would otherwise get squeezed out, like writing, thinking creatively, or building relationships. — Anonymous

But it must be seen that the term 'catastrophe' has this 'catastrophic' meaning of the end and annihilation only in a linear vision of accumulation and productive finality that the system imposes on us. Etymologically, the term only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle leading to what can be called the 'horizon of the event,' to the horizon of meaning, beyond which we cannot go. Beyond it, nothing takes place that has meaning for us - but it suffices to exceed this ultimatum of meaning in order that catastrophe itself no longer appear as the last, nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our current collective fantasy. — Jean Baudrillard

Three Steps to Mastery First, read in your field for at least one hour every day. Get up a little earlier in the morning and read for thirty to sixty minutes in a book or magazine that contains information that can help you to be more effective and productive at what you do. Second, — Brian Tracy

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that's likely to save the planet one day. — Mark Manson

The present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in five minutes or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life is to live in the present, and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment, and in the place where your body is now. Do a fair day's work, and then stop. Overwork is not productive in the long run. — Emmet Fox

Two Awesome Hours in the Morning After identifying your MIT, you need to turn it into a calendar item and book it as early in your day as possible. Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics, suggests that most people are most productive and have the highest cognitive functioning in the first two hours after they're fully awake. In a Reditt Ask Me Anything, Ariely wrote: One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours of their day on things that don't require high cognitive capacity (like social media). If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want. — Kevin Kruse

Oh yeah - you have to write every day. Or every weekday. Because writing is a job. It's not eureka moments over and over. It's grueling work, panning for gold. You just keep at it and eventually you get a few grains. Or flakes. Or whatever gold looks like in rivers. Or maybe it's like fishing. Who cares? You just have to do it every day because you never know which day is going to be your productive day. — Tim Schafer

In forming a judgment of ourselves now, Edwards writes, we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day ... . There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence ... . The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine. — William James

I do my best writing between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.. Almost every friend I have who is a consistently productive writer, does their best writing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. My quota is two crappy pages per day. I keep it really low so I'm not so intimidated that I never get started. I will do the gathering of interviews and research throughout the day. I'll get all my notes and materials together and then I'll do the synthesis between 10 p.m. to bed, which is usually 4 or 5 a.m. — Tim Ferriss

Some say that by fighting the terrorists abroad since September the 11th, we only stir up a hornets' nest. But the terrorists who struck that day were stirred up already. If America were not fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, what would these thousands of killers do - suddenly begin leading productive lives of service and charity? ... We are dealing here with killers who have made the death of Americans the calling of their lives. — George W. Bush

My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window. — Gail Caldwell

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in. — Piper Kerman

The efficient orgasm is the most productive moment of the day, because, apocalyptically, it has wiped the slate clean, and no one will ever know about it. What are you going to do now? Most of the time you could go back to reading. Some of the time you fantasize about a ragtag group of strangers thrown together by circumstance who go on a quest for some orgasm big enough to leave them wanting something different than they wanted before.

Like what? Gross food? Ugly stuff? Feeling like crap? Not understanding anything?

All you do is lie in bed with no underwear, trying to think of something bigger and better. — Lucy Corin

How you wake up each day and your morning routine (or lack thereof) dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life. Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days-which inevitably create a successful life-in the same way that unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre mornings generate unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre days, and ultimately a mediocre quality of life. By simply changing the way you wake up in the morning, you can transform any area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible. — Hal Elrod

Endeavor to work as hard as possible to attain a new aim with each day that comes by. Don't go to bed until you have achieved something productive — Aliko Dangote

I am in the process of trying to decide whether I can make a substantive and productive contribution to the policy-making process. I was always there because I wanted to work on the pressing issues of the day - I'm interested in energy, I'm interested in the climate bill and technology policy. — Charles Bass

Using coconut oil is a great way to regulate your blood sugar levels and keep you balanced and productive throughout the day. — Ben Night

When children do not have three square meals a day, a proper education, and at least one adult who they know loves and is committed to them, it's very unlikely they will grow up to be productive citizens of the world. — Stephanie March

Have a 4P Kind of Day! Positive, Productive, Progressive, Prosperous — Yolanda M. Johnson-Bryant

His day had been just like so many others - a boring as hell meeting in the morning, consisting of people going over the same conversations they'd already had via email, then working on a few projects when he was actually given any time to be productive. It was all so pointless, such a waste of resources. The afternoon had been filled making a few calls to clients then answering emails that he didn't doubt would then be discussed at length, again, the next day in yet another meeting. — Al K. Line

If you're trying to be miserable, it's important you don't have any goals. No school goals, personal goals, family goals. Your only objective each day should be to inhale and exhale for sixteen hours before you go to bed again. Don't read anything informative, don't listen to anything useful, don't do anything productive. If you start achieving goals, you might start to feel a sense of excitement, then you might want to set another goal, and then your miserable mornings are through. To maintain your misery, the idea of crossing off your goals should never cross your mind. — John Bytheway

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five. — J. Cole

Habit is a good thing for the human race ... You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don't have any left for productive labor. — Marilyn French

I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine. — Yann Martel

The secret to productive goal setting is in establishing clearly defined goals, writing them down and then focusing on them several times a day with words, pictures and emotions as if we've
already achieved them. — Denis Waitley

The total average cost of driving, including depreciation, maintenance, and insurance, runs about 61 cents a mile, and since the average automobile used for commuting to work contains only 1.1 people, every commute costs a little more than 55 cents per passenger mile. This means that, if you're an automobile commuter traveling twenty-five miles each way to work, you're spending around $30 a day for the privilege, not including the cost, if there is one, to park. You're also spending an hour every day for which, unless you're a cabbie or bus driver yourself, you're not getting paid, and during which you're not doing anything productive at all. For the average American, that's another $24. In transportation, time really is money. — Samuel I. Schwartz

For instance, why do we still work eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year, when we're twice as productive as we were 50 years ago? — Jacob Lund Fisker

I push every day against forces that say you have to go faster, be more effective, be more productive, you have to constantly outdo yourself, you have to constantly outdo your neighbor - all of the stuff that creates an incredibly productive society, but also a very neurotic one. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The number of the hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. It is our most precious resource. The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become. The more we blame others or external circumstances, the more negative and compromised our energy is likely to be. — Jim Loehr

When you're a professional you do your job no matter what gets in the way. You might take a sick day, you might take a personal day, but then you show back up or you won't get paid. Everyone develops his/her own strategy for dealing with days that are not productive. — Charlaine Harris

Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water. — Siobhan Davies

My favorite "trick" is to stop writing at a point where I know that I can pick up easily the next day. I'll stop in mid-paragraph, often in midsentence. It makes getting out of bed so much easier, because I know that all I'll have to do to be productive is complete the sentence. And by then I'll be seated at my desk, coffee and Oreo cookie at hand, the morning's inertia overcome. There's an added advantage: The human brain hates incomplete sentences. All night my mind will have secretly worked on the passage and likely mapped out the remainder of the page, even the chapter, while simultaneously sending me on a dinner date with Cate Blanchett. — Erik Larson

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling ... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience. — Edmund Burke

The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime. — Antony Beevor

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day. — Chris Crutcher

Treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to. — Seth Godin