Preparation is never time wasted. You cannot have great recitals, if you have poor rehearsals.

A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life.

Procrastination is illogical from every viewpoint. It is like the man who wanted to cross the stream, so he sat on the bank to wait for all the water to run by.

One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.

The law of increasing returns says that the more you focus on doing the few things that represent the most valuable use of your time, the better you become at those activities and the less time it takes you to accomplish each one.

The first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

You can get control of your time and your life only by changing the way you think, work, and deal with the never-ending river of responsibilities that flows over you each day. You can get control of your tasks and activities only to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few activities that can really make a difference in your life.

Apply the Law of Three: Identify the three things you do in your work that account for 90 percent of your contribution, and focus on getting them done before anything else. You will then have more time for your family and personal life.

Go through your life regularly and practice "creative abandonment": Consciously determine the activities that you are going to discontinue so that you have more time to spend on those tasks that can really make a difference to your future.

Make work appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them. Set aside thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-minute time segments that you use to work on and complete important tasks. Many highly productive people schedule specific activities in preplanned time slots all day long. These people build their work lives around accomplishing key tasks one at a time.

Your frog is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.