Stephen Covey Quotes

Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.

Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.

As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.

The more business one has, the more you are able to accomplish, for you learn to economize your time.

The more Strategic Work you do, the more effective, productive, and joyful the Tactical Work becomes.

Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

Don't confuse activity with productivity. Many people are simply busy being busy.

you have to do more than just kill time or time will quickly kill you.

Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

I try to compartmentalize as much as possible, and I have the most amazing team in the world. They really set up my time in a way that is completely efficient all the time.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

You can have anything you want, but not everything. If it was really important to spend an afternoon at my daughter's school, I had to think, how was I going to organize my life to do that? How could I become more efficient? I always tried to put my priorities on the table, personal and professional, and work around them.

You don't have to get things done all the time to be productive.

Anything that is wasted effort represents wasted time. The best management of our time thus becomes linked inseparably with the best utilization of our efforts.

I'm trying to keep my days very efficient, and I keep my set really tight. Every single corner is active, and everybody gets to thrive in the job that they do. I don't waste people's time.

Leadership is inspiring people. Management is keeping the trains running on time.

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.

There will always be another email to get through; something to clean up, file, and organize; more errands to do. Which is why balance is so important. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.

Getting all the things down game-management wise, that's what I want to excel at.