44 Productivity Quotes to Inspire You in 2020
A good quote has the power to inspire action and motivate you to keep going when you need it most.
Below are 44 our of favourite productivity quotes, from Tim Cook to Derek Sivers, to inspire and motivate you to win the day and achieve your goals.
To make this list of quotes more digestible, we’ve organised the quotes into six categories:
Inspirational Productivity Quotes
#1 Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
– Franz Kafka
#2 Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.
– Paul J. Meyer
#3 Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
– Adam Grant
#4 Being stuck in a rut can kill your creativity, stress you out, and zap your productivity. Doing the same thing over and over again causes your days to blend together.
– Amy Morin
#5 Happiness, the feeling of positivity, really is the foundation of productivity.
– Miguel McKelvey
Team Productivity Quotes
#6 The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
– Peter Drucker
#7 When you care about people’s happiness and productivity, you give them what brings out the best in them and their creativity.
– Tim Cook
#8 The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization.
– Ken Blanchard
#9 The trick to maximizing your team’s productivity is to create a workspace that’s flexible, so it can be altered according to the ever-changing needs of the company and its team members.
– Neil Blumenthal
#10 Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They’re just more engaged at work.
– Tom Rath
#11 Positive and engaged brains are a company’s greatest assets. More than time and even more than productivity, people must be happy.
– Shawn Achor
#12 Understanding your employee’s perspective can go a long way towards increasing productivity and happiness.
– Kathryn Minshew
Productive Mindset Quotes
#13 Each minute is a little thing, and yet, with respect to our personal productivity, to manage the minute is the secret of success.
– Joseph B. Wirthlin
#14 From a productivity perspective, prioritization is key. And it’s very easy to focus on clearing the decks of minutia, especially when one’s very busy.
– Ivanka Trump
#15 Smart vacations lead to greater happiness and energy at work and, therefore, greater productivity, intelligence, and resilience.
– Shawn Achor
#16 I believe productivity is a deeply personal thing. We all have different brains and, therefore, different preferences, perspectives, and situations where we feel most effective.
– Mark Manson
#17 We all have a personal recipe for productivity. One person may need six cups of autonomy and just a pinch of collaboration. Another person may require heaps of sociability and noise, with just a teaspoon of occasional privacy.
– Neil Blumenthal
#18 When you waste a moment, you have killed it in a sense, squandering an irreplaceable opportunity. But when you use the moment properly, filling it with purpose and productivity, it lives on forever.
– Menachem Mendel Schneerson
#19 Don’t worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue.
– Tom Rath
#20 The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.
– Mitch Kapor
#21 Productivity doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be easily boosted through a manageable combination of the right tools, resources, and habits to make the most of your time.
– Caroline Ghosn
#22 The years after 50 can be a time of great productivity, meaningful work, pleasure, creativity, and innovation. It’s a huge opportunity.
– Jane Pauley
#23 No, I’m not very productive at all. I’m probably like an animal. I mean, great animals in the ocean feed all the time. I’m someone who procrastinates, worries, for most of a month, and then I’ll have a flurry of manic productivity with a sense of great urgency and fear for, like, two days.
– Jonathan Ames
#24 In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.
– Jeffrey Kluger
#25 It’s far too much to say that effective hoping is the only – or even the biggest – part of what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to hope, that means 86% is dependent on raw talent, fickle business cycles, the quality of the product you’re selling, and often pure, dumb luck.
– Jeffrey Kluger
#26 I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.
– Tim Ferriss
Wellness & Productivity Quotes
#27 Many business leaders still believe that time on-task equates to productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too. Every key facet required for business success will fail when sleep becomes short within an organisation.
– Matthew Walker
#28 Early rising will enhance your productivity, improve your mental outlook, and give you time to exercise, catch up on email, or just have breakfast with your family. In short, if you want to become more successful, it’s a good idea to jump out of bed earlier.
– John Rampton
#29 Make no mistake about it. Bad habits are called ‘bad’ for a reason. They kill our productivity and creativity. They slow us down. They hold us back from achieving our goals. And they’re detrimental to our health.
– John Rampton
Productive Environment Quotes
#30 I couldn’t understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn’t flying as much.
– Simon Sinek
#31 You may think having a cluttered desk isn’t that big of a deal. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Disorganization can stunt your professional growth and decrease your productivity.
– John Rampton
#32 We’re designing environments that make us crazy. And it’s not just our quality of life which suffers. It’s our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.
– Julian Treasure
#33 People don’t value strongly enough how much time they spend in the office. Imagine you could work with people you love – wouldn’t work be great and staff turnover be lower? And your productivity higher?
– Howard Lutnick
#34 For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.
– John Hodgman
#35 A work-only zone does wonders for your productivity. So, I prefer working at the office now. I spend 8 focused hours there, then I go home to be present with my family.
– Derek Sivers
Productivity Technology Quotes
#36 Cell phones, mobile e-mail, and all the other cool and slick gadgets can cause massive losses in our creative output and overall productivity.
– Robin S. Sharma
#37 Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.
– Amy Cuddy
#38 As a tech optimist, I believe productivity woes can be solved through cleverly imagined and implemented technology.
– Caroline Ghosn
#39 Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.
– Ryan Holmes
#40 Tech companies are famous for providing freedom for engineers to customize their environments & experiment with new tools… allowing for this freedom helps creativity and productivity.
– Alex Stamos
#41 A lot of productivity is capturing ideas. I use a wiki – it’s more valuable than e-mail for running a company – and I have a page for every person with whom I interact frequently.
– Garrett Camp
#42 Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it’s skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
– Noreena Hertz
#43 TV’s not the problem, and I’m tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV’s getting in your way of writing a book, then you don’t want to write a book bad enough.
– Andrea Seigel
For more inspirational quotes on productivity, check out productivityquot.es, a productivity quote generator built by the Serene team at one of our team hackathons. Alternatively, you can download the Serene browser extension, which displays motivational productivity quotes on your browser’s new tab screen.#44 The cloud-powered smartphone and tablet, as productivity tools, are transforming the world around us along with the implied changes in how we work to be mobile and more social.
– Steven Sinofsky
