Lucy Hawking Quotes

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

Otherwise, my whole career has just been flinging myself at whatever is most overdue first and letting everything else stack up.

I mean, I can get things done if I need to, but I can really be completely irresponsible and procrastinate until the very, very, very bitter end. In fact, sometimes I work better under pressure.

The way I work, typically, I do everything at the very last minute.

I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet? I just feel that a few months ahead of time.

Don't fool yourself that important things can be put off till tomorrow; they can be put off forever, or not at all

The real key is time management and being able to focus on what you need to, on using every available minute to accomplish something that needs to be done.

I put second things first, and then worry about first things.

Do not put off today's work until tomorrow, lest work accumulate and you achieve nothing.

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.

One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.

One of the problems that exacerbates procrastination is the feeling that you have lots of different things to do and no clear sense of which matter more, when they should be done, etc.

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

Leave for tomorrow what you can't do today.

You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last-minute panic.

I don't need time. What I need is a deadline!

Oh, they've been putting in the long hours ... But is that because they don't have the skills, and everything takes twice as long? Or do they put in these hours to avoid what they should be doing ... which is stopping and binning a lot of [their work]?

Anything I do today, I regard as urgent.

Some people procrastinate so much that all they can do is run around like firefighters all day - putting out fires that should not have gotten started in the first place.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 AM and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 PM to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

I'm a project guy, but when my list of things to do gets too long or involved, it can stress me out to the point of catatonia. So I focus on the small stuff first and keep the larger picture as motivation - but not so close that it overwhelms.

Stop putting it off! Procrastination breeds guilt, guilt breeds depression, and depression breeds failure.

If there is something that you have to do, resist the temptation to do it under duress. Ask yourself, "What's the worst thing that would happen if I didn't do this?" And if you can get away with not doing it at all, don't do it. And then imagine what would it feel like to have this done. Spend a day or two, if you can, just 15 minutes here, 5 minutes here, 2 minutes here, here and here, imagining it completed in a way that pleases you! And then, the next time you decide that you're going to take action about it, the action is going to be a whole lot easier.

There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.

Do one thing at a time. Start the day with a list of things you have to do, and do the most important things first.