“Done is better than perfect.”

- From Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

- Charles Darwin

“Here’s one way to approach it: Push the ultimate desired outcome off into an unknowable future horizon then break the big goal down into smaller chunks. Identify THE next most important little domino that needs to get knocked over. Set a challenging but realistic target for THAT goal, then figure out the PROCESS you need to engage in on a daily basis to hit that goal and voila! You’re an instant success as you show up and take the next baby step, remembering to celebrate the small wins as you create a feeling of continuous achievement. Remember: We want that inspiring, jumbo-huge goal to serve as a RUDDER pointing us in the right direction as we practice staying fully engaged in one moment after the other. That’s much better than using our unrealistic goal as a measuring stick that depletes our energy as we worry about why we’re not already at our goal.”

- Brian Johnson, Heroic.us

“Set into motion the actions necessary to achieve the things you currently claim are important, yet keep being put off.”

- From Harris Rules by Tim and Julie Harris

“Massive action is the key to productivity. Massive action means you take action until you get the results you want.”

- Natalie Bacon

"Ending your day with planning sets you up for a purposeful and productive tomorrow."

- From High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way by Brendon Burchard

“Research shows that beginning your day with a victory puts you in a positive mood. This morning momentum leads to more victories and continued progress throughout the day. You also win your health battles early in the morning. Making time to exercise and choosing the right foods for the first meal of the day will help you make better decisions all day long. The right decisions will give you more energy so that you will be more productive, mentally sharp, and free from fatigue—and even pain—all day long. Your first victory sets the proverbial ball rolling. This first win is also the biggest win and one that no one can take away from you. That’s why you must start early and control your morning, so that (barring external emergencies) your day will go exactly as planned.”

- From The Perfect Day Formula by Craig Ballantyne

“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.”

- From The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod

“Early morning is the most critical time of each day. How you spend the beginning hours of your day sets the stage for the remaining hours. If you purposefully establish a routine for spending your early morning as you want to, you will have taken a giant step toward spending the rest of your life the way you want to. How we spend our mornings is the litmus test for our degree of self-mastery. Do we wake up with a plan for the day or are we scrambling, wasting time figuring out what we must do? If we have a plan for the day, do we consistently follow it? Do we follow a purposefully predetermined, set routine which makes us more efficient and productive, and allows more time to think and relax? Or do we haphazardly scramble to get ready and out the door to make it to work just in time? Our mornings expose the power of our routines. Whether our routines are made up of good habits or bad habits is most evident in how we spend our early morning hours. If we are to get the most out of life and come closer to reaching our potential, it’s crucial that we establish good morning habits that allow us to more effectively utilize our early morning hours.”

- From The Power of Habit by Jack D. Hodge

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

- Peter Drucker

“The people who achieve extraordinary results don’t achieve them by working more hours. They achieve them by getting more done in the hours they work.”

- From The ONE Thing by Gary Keller

“What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

- From The ONE Thing by Gary Keller

“When you switch from Task A to Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow – a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task.” So even if you don’t try to multi-task and focus on just one thing at a time, each time you switch to a new task you are getting sub-optimal performance on the new task.”

- From Deep Work by Cal Newport

“Be wary of letting random emails chip away at your productivity—life is too short to let strangers dictate what you do with your day.”

- From Unsubscribe by Jocelyn K. Glei

"It's hard to build momentum if you're dividing your attention."

- James Clear

“The first discipline is to focus your finest efforts on the one or two goals that will make all the difference, instead of giving mediocre effort to dozens of goals. Execution starts with focus.“

- From The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling

“20% of what we do leads to 80% of the results; but 80% of what we do leads to only 20%. We are wasting 80% of our time on low-value outcomes.”

- From The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch

“High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus). To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”

- From Deep Work by Cal Newport

“Productivity can be boiled down to one word - FOCUS. There are two types of focus you need to master productivity. First the ability to manage distractions so that you can focus moment-to-moment on the task at hand, and second, the skill of focusing on what’s truly important to you in the big picture, so you don’t waste your day on stupid stuff.”

- From The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins

“Success requires us to do the first things first. Choose to use your time wisely. Figure out what really matters to you and then use the rest of the steps to build habits that allow you to focus your time on it.”

- From The Perfect Day Formula by Craig Ballantyne