Like most people in the twenty-first century, I love a good quote. And what’s more, is that they’ve been incredibly helpful in motivating me. So of course I wanted to share them with you! Here are my favourite productivity quotes and how they’ve helped me.
It’s not how much you do, it’s what you do
Efficiency is the foundation for survival. Effectiveness is the foundation of success
John C. Maxwell
This quote is super important and is the foundation of most of what I teach here at Planning with Maggie Rae.
Efficiency is the ability to get a lot of things done. But we can be busy all we like and it never actually means that we get much accomplished. Doing the right things is incredibly important if we’re going to move the needle on projects and truly be productive and successful.
And that’s what effectiveness is. We choose to do the tasks that have the biggest impact. We can choose what’s going to give us the most return on the effort that we’re putting in.
Success comes from the big things.
Things like eating well consistently, not watching the Food Network for 3 hours a day. This consistent effort in doing the right things is what leads to great things in our lives.
You can’t finish what you don’t start
The secret to getting ahead is getting started
Mark Twain
Fewer things are truer.
There is a weird fear that lives in many of us that makes us feel like if we don’t try we can’t fail. But in reality, we ALWAYS fail if we don’t try.
The only way to learn and develop is by trying something new and this is how we come to realize our strengths, our gifts and our passions.
There is no way to get around doing the work if we want the result and the only way to get ahead is, indeed, to just start.
Destination: Unknown
If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.
Yogi Berra
This quote just captures the grind of so many people’s life.
We focus on what’s right in front of us, what’s chronologically next for us, and we forget about how the decisions we make right now are the ones that affect our future.
I remember being given the example of a vacation- when we’re going to go on vacation the first thing we decide is where we want to go. After we’ve made that choice we figure out how to get there and what we need to do.
But most people won’t think of it that way in their life. They’ll think “I have $100 right now and 2 hours” and you end up at the mall spending that money on something you don’t really need instead of putting it towards something you truly want.
This is how we end up with lives we don’t love.
We made easy decisions without a lot of consideration and ended up somewhere entirely different than we thought.
Choosing the goals for our life will allow us to make decisions based on knowing whether it’s bringing us closer to what we want or further away. And makes a huge difference.
Planning isn’t all about the stationary
Without leaps of imagination and dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Gloria Steinem
A mistake that’s often made is that plans are the death of dreams. That by being “practical” you get rid of the spontaneity of life.
I think this is entirely untrue.
In order to have a great life I believe you need to dream. Dreaming and imagining give us the destination we want to end up at. This is vital as we’ve just gone through since it’s so hard to end up somewhere in particular if you don’t plan on it.
It would be the equivalent of thinking you’ll eventually end up in Madagascar by roaming the world aimlessly, never looking at a map or getting directions. You might still get there but the chances are drastically reduced.
But if you dream of a place with lush jungle, white sand beaches, animals that don’t exist anywhere else and amazing vanilla you’ll want to be in Madagascar and if you plan a way to get there you most likely will.
See how much of a difference dreaming makes?
Dreaming also gives us motivation. We dream of something so fantastic that we have to make it happen.
Nobody is ever too busy
Good things happen when you set your priorities straight.
Scott Caan
Figuring out how to prioritize was one of the hardest but most necessary lessons I’ve learned.
If you don’t have priorities you’ll end up being a slave to the things that are, or at least seem, urgent.
It may seem that many things are urgent even though they really aren’t. Just think about the ringing of the phone or someone interrupting you while you’re working. These things seem urgent but most of the time they aren’t things that require your immediate attention.
By learning to assess these situations and stick to the things that are important and impactful good things happen.
You’re also never too busy to work on the things that matter. Instead you’re choosing to focus and put your energy into the things that don’t serve you. Once you change this and start focusing on your priorities you’ll get so much done that it’ll blow your socks off.
What’s in a Quote?
These were 5 quotes that have really challenged me and helped me become more productive as a person.
Do you have any quotes that have impacted your life positively?
I want to hear about them so make sure to comment below so that I can read the productivity quotes that have made a difference for you!
