Jennifer Weiner Quotes

I do everything via email. Which in turn works as my tickler file and prioritization queue. I start at the top every morning and keep on going until I'm finished. I don't do calls. I don't do meetings.

If I have a 12 or 14 hour workday, I am home the next. I cut out anything that is frivolous or doesn't need to be done.

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I'd like to use my time more carefully.

I read mails throughout the day but answer mails more in the morning and evening.

Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess.

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.

I try not to schedule too many meetings. That's one of the things I learned in corporate America - that you can spend your days having meetings and never actually have time to work.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days.

It makes me so much calmer when I’m responding to e-mails later.

We're at the point now where the challenge isn't how to communicate effectively with e-mail; it's ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most.

I haven't had the time to do a lot of writing. But nothing's really changed about me. It's just my day-to-day activities have changed, and as a person, I have to adapt to those changes.

I can't spend my whole day talking to people.

For years, I'd say yes to almost everything, trying to be nice and generous. Feeling obliged to be of service to the world. Maybe also a fear of being forgotten if I don't. But I paid the ultimate price in doing that, because for all those years, I got almost no work done! Some famous authors have written about this: that if they said yes to every request, then they'd never have time to write another book again.

I took two important phone calls while in the shower today because I'm a goddam professional.

I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.

Sneaking up on it sometimes helps: I've found I can be very productive for an hour before dinner, because there obviously isn't enough time to really do anything, so I can tell myself I'm just screwing around.

I write at all different times. I write in my bed, I write at the table. I need to get it together. I'm working on a book and working, and just jam it in whenever it makes sense.

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.

I am a person who always feels like I am not doing the right thing because there's always so many things that need to get done.

I would not live over my hours past ... not unto Cicero's ground because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse.

I have succeeded in getting my actual work down to thirty minutes a day. That leaves me eighteen hours for engineering.

I don't have the patience to sit and write.

You let things run in order to have some sanity and be able to do your work and not feel pre-judged.

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.