Temple Grandin Quotes

I literally have over a thousand emails in my inbox that need to be returned. I'm sure all of my friends and certain family members are like, 'Oh, look who got nominated for an Emmy and doesn't want to write me an email back!' I need a good few hours to just sit and get on the phone.

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

I hate phones. All businesses are personal businesses, and I always try my best to get back to people, but sometimes the barrage of calls is so enormous that if I just answered calls I would do nothing else.

My life is scheduled to the minute. I used to be notoriously hard to get a hold of. But now, it would be irresponsible for me to say, 'I'm not checking my phone.'

We are continuously bombarded with information, appeals, deadlines, communications... We are continually being squeezed or projected into the future as our present moments are assaulted and consumed in the fires of endless urgency.

Far too many people hide behind their busy lifestyles

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Don't confuse activity with productivity. Many people are simply busy being busy.

There are a whole lot of people who are so freakin' busy—they've so cluttered up their lives—they're at their wits' end. And if they'd only just stop for a minute, they could hear the God of the universe whisper to them, “I love you.

I am busy right now with my family, let alone all my other projects. It's an opportunity if it presents itself.

Nevertheless, hateful as saying 'No' always is to an imaginative person, and certain as the offence may be that it will cause to individuals whose own work does not require isolated effort, the writer who is engaged on a book must learn to say it. He must say it consistently to all interrupters; to the numerous callers and correspondents who want him to speak, open bazaars, see them for 'only' ten minutes, attend literary parties, put people up, or read, correct and find publishers for semi-literate manuscripts by his personal friends.

Life seems to be busy for most people and if you know you are doing the best you can then there really is nothing more you can do then that.

Anytime anybody goes, "Wow you've been busy." I'm like, "No, not since college. This is a cakewalk in comparison."

I'm not a very organized person for being uber work-obsessed. I struggle to keep it all organized because everything can become important and, when you have so many spinning plates, they sometimes can cancel each other out because you lose track of everything.

There's no time to be bored. I'm so busy doing the horse dance...

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

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

My first company was MicroSolutions. I worked 20 hours a day. I didn't take a vacation for 7 years. I didn't even take the time to read a fiction book. It was all about work. When I sold it, I promised myself I would never wear a watch and only wear a suit to weddings, funerals and to meet the President.

You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.

Don't be so busy trying to make a living that you're too busy to make a life.

I've read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can't do it forever, and you don't want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.

The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.

The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can't save time. You can only spend it wisely or foolishly. The Bisy Backson has practically no time at all, because he's too busy wasting it by trying to save it. And by trying to save it, he ends up wasting the whole thing.

There's sometimes when I feel really balanced, and there's other times when I feel like I'm trying to keep juggling too many balls in the air, and I feel like I'm on the edge of dropping all of them and having them all land on my head, you know? Scheduling is a big part of it, and the other is just remaining flexible and keeping a sense of humor about things.

When you're working and you're busy and you're successful, no matter what, something suffers, whether it's your relationship with your mother, your relationship with your whole family. Certain things suffer and take the back burner, not because they're on the back burner in your heart but because the world just moves so quickly. A lot of people, when they're chasing their dreams, they have to leave people they love.