"Distractions like butterflies are buzzing 'round my head", sings Paul McCartney, and we all nod our heads as a gesture of approval. The contemporary world spins around incredibly quickly, keeping us busy and stressed almost all the time.
We all envy those extremely efficient people that polished their time management skills to nearly perfection. They manage business projects, feed their dogs, go camping, organize friends' birthday parties, and never forget to call their parents.
How do they accomplish all that? Luckily, advanced modern technologies can help us with a variety of time-consuming things, such as repetitive tasks, scheduling meetings, planning events, generating reports, and analyzing data. For instance, Bitrix24 has a feature for everything, it can be your planner, calendar, centralized client management hub, or even communication tool.
Yet, what if you're just feeling down today? In this case, here are some inspirational time management quotes that can get you back on track and help you become productive again.
People tend to create order out of chaos. We organize, we measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, and days. We plan to make the most out of our time. However, some people are definitely better at it than the other. So, let's start with time management quotes that can provide you with an insight on what your planning process might lack.
"Either you run the day or the day runs you."
Jim Rohn
"Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days."
Zig Ziglar
"The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one's day and every night to examine the results obtained."
Alexis Carrel
"The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it."
Arthur Schopenhauer
"The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot."
Michael Altshuler
"Better to be three hours too soon, than a minute too late."
William Shakespeare
First, you need to acknowledge the basic fact that we are all stuck with the same amount of time to plan around. It's 24 hours, no more, no less. But the authors of these time management quotes are right, you shouldn't waste time (pun intended) on feeling bad about it and wishing days were longer. On the contrary, you should start your morning routine with thorough planning if you want to run your day and not the other way around.
It's up to us to decide how we spend our time. From the beginning, our day is a series of choices. For instance, can you wake up early and go for a run, or you can skip it today and hit the "snooze" button. We are always busy with something, but the question is whether we're busy with the right things. Prioritizing can be tricky because people are always eager to talk themselves into believing that what seems important right now would be still important from the long-term perspective. Here are some of the best time management quotes to help you figure out your real priorities.
"You don't need more time… You just need to decide."
Seth Godin
"We all know our money isn't infinite, yet we end up treating our time and energy and attention as if they are."
Shane Parrish
"Time = life; therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life."
Alan Lakein
If you take a closer look at these time management quotes, you'll see that the first thing you need to do is to start treating your time like an essential asset and spending it accordingly. The most efficient way to achieve this goal is it learn how to distinguish urgent and important things. The Eisenhower Matrix offers a simple way to do it. All of your tasks fall into these categories:
Important & urgent. They cannot be put aside, you need to complete them as soon as possible.
Important & nonurgent. These tasks can be delayed, but you still have to do them to achieve your goals.
Not important, but urgent. These things distract you, so you need to make them your lowest priority. You can ask someone else to do them or get back to them later.
Not important & nonurgent. These things don't deserve your attention, don't put them on your schedule.
Procrastination is a common enemy, the odds are you won't find a person who hasn't experienced this desire to "just do it...later". But this state of mind doesn't occur solely among ordinary people, the greatest representatives of humanity suffered from it too. Hence, why not to learn some lessons from their wisdom? Let's use these time management quotes to do so.
"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."
Stephen King
"Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week."
Spanish proverb
"You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again."
Benjamin Franklin
"A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life."
Charles Darwin
The desire to procrastinate can be caused by plenty of psychological factors, such as stress, lack of inner resources, a depressed state of mind, or exhaustion. If you catch yourself postponing urgent matters, and you admit that you're procrastinating, it's the first step to win this battle. However, the second step is to actually start working on your tasks, which can be tricky. One of the solutions is to trick yourself into doing something with the Systrom's 5-minute rule. All you have to do is to negotiate with yourself and decide that you'll do this task just for five minutes. As soon as you start working, you'll get more involved and won't be willing to leave things half-done, so you'll end up finishing the whole process. Anyway, the time management quotes above teach that the only effective strategy to defeat procrastination is to recognize that time flows regardless of your perception of it. So you better stop waiting for the right mood and get to work!
Concentrating on the task at hand is almost as hard as fighting your desire to procrastinate. With social media and cute cats all over the Internet, it's almost impossible to stay focused. Indeed, keeping distractions away and maintaining focus requires a high level of self-control and discipline. But in the end, you'll be rewarded with more satisfying results accomplished in a shorter period of time. If you've lost your concentration, here are some time management quotes to help you regain your ability to focus.
"Time Management is a misnomer, the challenge is to manage ourselves."
Stephen Covey
"The essence of self-discipline is to do the important thing rather than the urgent thing."
Barry Werner
"Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own."
Bruce Lee
"It's surprising how much free time and productivity you gain when you lose the busyness in your mind."
Brittany Burgunder
"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
Albert Einstein
Unfortunately, scientist warn us that we can dedicate our full attention to the tasks for 5 hours a day at best. Therefore, the answer is to prioritize. You need to decide what's important and concentrate on doing these things properly. You already know how to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. According to our time management quotes, this means that the only thing you need to do is to banish "useless" things from your life and focus on what really matters.
How many times a day do you think that you'd be way more productive if only you had more time? Is that really true? With the pandemic and quarantine measures, many people found out that they were wrong about it. Sometimes planning or concentrating just isn't enough. Use these time management quotes to find out what vital elements your productivity boosting tactics are missing.
"If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Abraham Lincoln
"Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week's value out of a year while another man gets a full year's value out of a week."
Charles Richards
"The key is in not spending time, but in investing it."
Stephen R. Covey
"One can find time for everything if one is never in a hurry."
Mikhail Bulgakov
"Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort."
Paul J. Meyer
These time management quotes confirm that productivity is a combination of efforts. It is your willingness to work hard, careful planning, and ability to stick to this plan. Thus, to be more productive, you have to:
Prioritize your tasks
Eliminate distractions
Optimize your schedule, so it matches your natural cycles.
Some people think that dealing with several things at a time makes you more efficient. Some companies even expect this quality from their employees. Still, practice alongside these time management quotes proves that multitasking usually leads to poor performance because people don't pay full attention to each of the things they're doing.
"The shorter way to do many things is to only do one thing at a time."
Mozart
"To do two things at once is to do neither."
Publius Syrus
"If you want to make good use of your time, you've got to know what's most important and then give it all you've got."
Lee Iacocca
"Don't make the same decision twice. Spend time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don't revisit the issue unnecessarily."
Bill Gates
These time management quotes were said by people who certainly know what they were talking about, and they can assure you that multitasking is not efficient. Most likely, the results of this approach will be disappointing. Thus, next time you feel the temptation to juggle responsibilities, remind yourself that it would be wiser to dedicate your time and efforts to one thing on your list and then move to another.
It might seem obvious that our minds and bodies need rest. But in a world where getting emotional burnout and being workaholic is so widespread, people can certainly use a reminder that spending time away from work isn't always about laziness, it can also mean recharging. Here are some inspiring time management quotes that might motivate you to take a couple of days off and return with more energy than ever.
"One can only forget about time by making use of it."
Charles Baudelaire
"The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time."
Abraham Lincoln
"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
John Lennon
There are plenty of motivational speeches on how it is vital to be productive. But it's crucial to remember that we cannot be focused and efficient forever. Sometimes we just have to let it go. Getting a break from work can be beneficial too. For instance, try finding new sources of inspiration or looking at your goals from a different perspective.
If you ever feel ashamed of your desire to disconnect from work for a while, take a look at our time management quotes, they will remind you that we shouldn't live to work, we should work to live.