"Heed the most important lesson of this book: You control your behavior. Your success is your personal responsibility. Take action. Do the first things first. Do what matters even if you don’t feel like it. Get up and give your number one priority the focus it deserves for at least fifteen minutes every morning. Your morning victories start with preparing properly the night before. You must have a plan in place to take action the next morning. The earlier you rise, the fewer opposing forces to your self-control, and the more momentum you’ll have to overcome the inertia of procrastination."

— Craig Ballantyne, The Perfect Day Formula

"Here is the formula: Start each day with a list of tasks that you need to complete. Organize the tasks from the most important to the least important. Start work on your most important task, and discipline yourself to work on it nonstop until it is complete."

— Brian Tracy, Time Management

"Look at the activities and commitments that currently fill your life. If you were starting from a blank slate, which of these would you add now? For everything else, is there a way you can wind these down over the next few months?"

— Laura Vanderkam, Off the Clock

"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."

— The 4DX Guys

"Do fewer things. You will never get caught up. You will never be able to do everything on your list. To get control of your life you must stop doing an enormous number of small things. Do more important things. Do the top three tasks that you have identified, and nothing else, until you have no more of those major tasks to do. Do your most important tasks more of the time, preferably all day long. The more time you spend doing the most important things, the more productive you will be on the outside and the happier you will feel on the inside."

— Brian Tracy, Time Management

"Be ruthless about what you ignore. Time, energy, and resources are so precious. You have to be ferocious about cutting your priorities—more than you realize and certainly more than is comfortable. You can only deeply commit to a few things. One or two? Maybe three? Every pretty good, sorta nice, kinda fun thing you abandon is like shedding a weighted vest that lets you move at top speed. You were so busy focusing on how much you could carry, you never realized you could run this fast."

— James Clear

"Because in reality your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time. If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things. One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most."

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

"Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you."

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

"Do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, whether you feel like it or not."

- David Horsager, The Trust Edge

"You will never be able to do everything on your list. To get control of your life you must stop doing an enormous number of small things. Do your most important tasks more of the time, preferably all day long. The more time you spend doing the most important things, the more productive you will be on the outside and the happier you will feel on the inside."

— Brian Tracy, Time Management

"Discipline is putting a Level 10 Effort into your Level 10 Problems."

- Craig Ballantyne

"Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions."

- Tim Ferriss

"Choosing to change your story from “I’m too busy” to “I have time for what matters to me” can make you see possibilities."

- Laura Vanderkam, Off the Clock

"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. Systems ensure you achieve both."

- Peter Drucker

"Because in reality your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time. If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things."

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

"Don’t let other people plan your day. Imagine your ideal day — then make it a reality. Plan what you want to accomplish each day, and don’t let anyone or anything interrupt your plans. Just follow your plan."

- Pat Hiban, 7 Steps to 7 Figures

"Be ruthless about what you ignore. Time, energy, and resources are so precious. Every pretty good, sorta nice, kinda fun thing you abandon is like shedding a weighted vest that lets you move at top speed."

- James Clear

"All that matters in life is doing the work on what really matters. Everything else is just entertainment."

- Craig Ballantyne, The Dark Side of Discipline

"All this noise. All this information. All these inputs. We are afraid of the silence. We are afraid of looking stupid. We are afraid of missing out. We are afraid of being the bad guy who says, ‘Nope, not interested.’ We’d rather make ourselves miserable than make ourselves a priority, than be our best selves. Than be still…and in charge of our own information diet."

- Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen.”

- Henry David Thoreau