“Work expands so as to fill the time available for completion.” In other words, if you have no bumpers, boundaries, or non-negotiables built into your life, you will always find more work to do to fill the void and vacuum. You’ll mire yourself in busy work and perfectionism out of a perverse need to appear “busy” without realizing that you are wasting your time--your most precious and finite resource--on activities that don’t do anything to drive your business or life forward. Even worse, when you don’t have clear boundaries between your work and life, they start to bleed into each other, preventing you from being fully present in either one. When you’re at work, you feel guilty that they haven’t spent more time with your family and when you’re with your family, you feel guilty because you haven’t accomplished enough work.”

- From The Perfect Week Formula by Craig Ballantyne

"Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning."

- Thomas Edison

"A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow."

- General George S. Patton

"Plans are nothing; planning is everything."

- Albert Einstein

"I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"A goal without a plan is just a wish."

- From The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"A weekly plan is your compass for staying on track with your goals."

- From 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam

"Invest time each week to reflect, strategize, and set your priorities for the next seven days."

- From Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy

"Plan your week, and then work your plan."

- From See You at the Top by Zig Ziglar

"A well-organized week creates a well-organized life."

- From Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

"Weekly planning is the key to deliberate living."

- From Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

"Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan."

- From The Path to Power by Margaret Thatcher

“The average person lives a reactive life. They get up. They fight to make it to work on time. That’s the extent of their planning. They haven’t looked any further ahead. They figure that when they get to work, then they’ll figure out something to do, or worse, a way to simply get through the day. They wait to be told what to do or react to whatever emergencies are thrown their way.”

- From The Perfect Day Formula by Craig Ballantyne

“Growth doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of intentional effort and consistent progress. You must define how you want to grow, then establish a plan to help you get there.”

- From Die Empty by Todd Henry

“The power of a plan is not that it will get you there. The power of a plan is that it will get you started. It’s easy to assume that you need to put together the plan that will get you there—in other words, the right plan. The plan that will work. No. The point is not to come up with the brilliant blueprint that is guaranteed to take you all the way to the finish line. The point is simply to come up with a plan that will get you out of the starting gate. It’s not even that your starting plan doesn’t necessarily get you there—it for sure won’t get you there, at least not the exact plan you conceive at first. Nobody has that degree of perfect precision in long-range planning, and there are too many variables and surprises along the way that will require adjustments to the plan. You have to start with a plan, but the plan you start with will not be the plan that gets you there.“

- From The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

“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

"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

“Your success starts in the morning. Plan your day. Get up early. Work on your number one priority in life before anything else. Add more structure to your day and you will have more freedom in your life for your family, friends, and hobbies.”

- From The Perfect Day Formula by Craig Ballantyne

“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

“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