Daniel Levitin Quotes

It's very easy to fool yourself that you're working, you know, when you're really not working very hard. I mean, I'm very lazy. So for me, I would always have an excuse, you know, to go - quit early, go to a museum, you know. So I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job. I keep a schedule.

My block was due to two overlapping factors: laziness and lack of discipline.

If I let myself go, nothing will get done.

The biggest challenge is to stay focused. It's to have the discipline when there are so many competing things.

Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren't. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren't applying themselves.

There will be many times in your lives--- at school, and more particularly when you are a grown up---when people will distract or divert you from what needs to be done. You may even welcome the distraction. But if you use it as an excuse for not doing what you suppose to do, you can blame no one but yourself. If you truly wish to accomplish something, you should allow nothing to stop you, and chances are you'll succeed.

Don't be silly and don't waste your time.

I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.

This life is yours and no one else's, and if you spend your time looking at other people's pages, you'll never get anything done.

Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy.

One of the things I'm really good at is procrastinating.

I'm a terrible procrastinator.

I'm so good at procrastinating.

The best way for me to procrastinate as a writer is research.

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

Every project is a race between your enthusiasm and your ability to get it done. Go fast. Don't slow down. A year from now, new things will interest you.

If you need five minutes every hour to look at tweets or to just surf the Internet, you need to schedule that into your schedule, allow yourself to do that. Because when people start procrastinating, what they've done is, they've tried to ignore that urge. They try to deny themselves time on Facebook or time surfing the web.

Without deadlines and restrictions I just tend to become preoccupied with other things.

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.

I couldn't understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn't flying as much.

The Web forces me to be disciplined and not to waste time - but before the Web was invented, there were plenty of opportunities to do that anyway.

One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.

Here in Seattle, I'm the most productive I've ever been. I don't allow myself personal distractions. I'm extremely disciplined here.

I would step into a place of being lined up with a sense of purpose and my inner compass, and everything was going in the same direction. Then I'd get lazy and get off the track. And then things would start to fall apart, and I'd back up and get it together again.