Judith Guest Quotes

If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?

I don't say no as much as I should. I'm an extreme workaholic. So I can be sick, and I still say yes to anything. When you are the CEO of your own company, editor of your own videos, your own writer, and you do every role yourself, you have a hard time saying no to opportunities.

I can't tell you how hard I worked the last year. In fact, I worked so hard that I know I can't maintain that same work level in 2001, so I've got to quit something.

It takes a lot of energy to work, in general, especially if you're the lead in something.

More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

I'm working over 80 hours a week and have to keep on track.

If your business keeps you so busy that you have no time for anything else, there must be something wrong, either with you or with your business.

Programmers work in bursts of productivity. Then, they let the brain rest and get back into it. A lot about the office world is not a great fit for me.

I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.

I have a concentrated period of work for about five months, and then I take a bunch of time off. That's just the way I work.

That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.

I really have to pace myself. I work about 75 hours a week.

Long hours don't necessarily mean success.

Even if I am working 12 hours a day, I want to be working, not sitting in my room for eight hours waiting for my shot.

Like many, I am often in back-to-back meetings most of the day.

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.

We live in a world where the more you're working, the more things you do. It's a workaday world.

Working too hard can give you a heart-attack.

How can we embrace rest and play if we've tied our self-worth to what we produce?

I'm always aware that I risk being taken for a neurasthenic prima donna when I explain to someone who wants 'just a little' of my time that five minutes of the wrong kind of distraction can ruin a working day.

You don't think I work 14 hours a day right now?! I mean, I still put in the hours, I still do the work.

I don't ever rest. It's a problem and hopefully something I will get a better handle on in the coming years.

Ninety nine percent of the time it's not urgent and to create a culture where you are constantly plugged in and expected to be always-on is to create a culture of burnout.

We don't have any problem finding enough things to do; the problem we have is making sure we don't overload ourselves inadvertently.

The bane of Americans is overwork-and the ruin of any work is a divided interest. Concentrate-concentrate. One thing at a time.