Quotes about Prioritization

Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.

Your crises and problems would shrink to manageable proportions because you would be thinking ahead, working on the roots, doing the preventive things that keep situations from developing into crises in the first place. In time management jargon, this is called the Pareto Principle—80 percent of the results flow out of 20 percent of the activities.

Pareto Principle—80 percent of the results flow out of 20 percent of the activities.

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, "like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic." No

it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

Effective people are not problem-minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively. They have genuine Quadrant I crises and emergencies that require their immediate attention, but the number is comparatively small.

If there is one message to glean from this wisdom, it is that a meaningful life is not a matter of speed or efficiency. It's much more a matter of what you do and why you do it, than how fast you get it done.

We're into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

When Gates first met Warren Buffett at a dinner, the host asked all those at the table what they saw as the single most important factor in their journey through life. As Alice Schroeder related in her book The Snowball, both Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word answer: "Focus" (Habit 3: Put First Things First

Many of us find that increasing our speed only makes things worse.

We're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realize we're in the wrong jungle.