E. W. Howe Quotes

It is not the hours we put in on the job, it is what we put into the hours that counts.

I usually sit down at 8 A.M. and work through to 7 P.M., with breaks that total no more than an hour and a half.

Possibly I am difficult to live with, but I don't bring my work home much. I'm either busy or not busy. And I don't work from home. I have an office here which has a white wall. No view. I did try working in a room with a view but it was too interesting. Too distracting.

I knew I could control one thing, and that is my time and my hours and my effort and my efficiency.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

No matter what your job is, you know that you need to have a routine, that you need to be disciplined, you need to work.

Normally I sleep in until 7, and most days, I go right into the office. On Tuesdays, though, I stay home and do work. I need a day when I'm not in meeting after meeting. You need time to try to get into your head again and see what's next.

If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond 'the office.' If they do say the office, they'll include a qualifier such as 'super-early in the morning before anyone gets in,' or 'I stay late at night after everyone's left,' or 'I sneak in on the weekend.'

Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.

Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

I get up every day and work in the morning. I have my coffee and get to work. On good days I look up and it's dark outside and the whole day has gone by and I don't know where it's gone. But there's bad days, too. Where I struggle and sweat and a half hour creeps by and I've written three words. And half a day creeps by and I've written a sentence and a half and then I quit for the day and play computer games. You know, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. [Laughs]

One either meets or one works.

Better to be busy than to be busy worrying.

I feel more productive, mostly because I feel like my ass is on the line. Before I had kids, I would sit around, drink, I don't even know what I did with myself.

I’ve come to realize that being a mother makes me a better executive, because motherhood forces prioritization. Being a mom gives you so much more clarity on what is important.

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.

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do a great deal if we choose our goals well and work diligently to attain them.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

Your greatest job is shedding what you don't have to do.

Time is passing, ... We have to look at the reality of the situation and ... redouble our efforts and get on with it.

The thing I have to be willing to do is work - I think I'm the one that is going to actually copyright the term "25/8." You ever hear of the term "25/8?" It's the cousin of "24/7." I have to go "25/8."

Find as many opportunities as you can and clock as many hours as you can.

The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.

One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.

I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.