Jane Smiley Quotes

I have always had trouble paying attention. When I was supposed to be at work, I'd be doodling. But then when I was home, trying to draw, I would be working on math problems. I never end up doing exactly what I should be doing at at any given time.

I find it so easy to get distracted - I try not to do more than one thing at any one time.

I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what's on the Internet and do laundry.

Multitasking? I can't even do two things at once. I can't even do one thing at once.

I don't consider myself a great multitasker, so I try to do one thing at a time, even though there were opportunities when I was wrestling.

If I leave my computer, I'm probably not going to get back for hours. If I take a few minutes to answer questions and go web surfing, then guilt kicks in and I get back to work.

But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance.

I procrastinate so much and I get distracted by anything.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.

Smart people tend to enjoy thinking about a lot of things at once. I'd say entrepreneurs should be serial monogamists; do one thing at a time until you make sufficient progress and then move on.

During my long study sessions in the library, I found myself watching YouTube videos during study breaks.

I have no organisational skills. All my energy goes into worry - worrying takes a lot of energy.

I set a goal for myself everyday when I write - 10 pages a day - and it's much harder because I'm too dumb to turn off my Twitter and everything so it's always on and it's a real distraction. It's a major distraction.

I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.

I need to have something else going on. I'm able to write a lot if I have an episode of 'Friday Night Lights' going on my computer.

My secret is simple. I have a very short attention span, and writing lots of things fast appeases that very attention span.

I always tell myself, 'When I'm working on my record, I won't cut my hair.' I get so focused on the music that I'm not really going to the hair shop and getting cut up. I just have one thing to focus on.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

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 always interrupt work with other work, either in a small way or big way, so that's normal.

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.

I think of myself as naturally idle. The trouble is, the 'nothing' that I do every day is not really nothing. I potter. I muck about with emails, I make coffee, I fiddle with my computer to make sure that the book I haven't started writing is perfectly synced across all platforms and devices.

Who begins too much accomplishes little.