Charles L. Allen Quotes

To be really productive, it's as important to rest when we're tired as it is to work when we're inspired.

I used to work very long hours. Then I started to realize that the stuff that I was writing in the late afternoons, I was generally throwing out. So I quit earlier than I used to.

I just feel I shouldn't work too much, because there are so many other things to do.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

Don't keep your own schedule - that will eat too much of your time keeping your own schedule. And when you are tired, stop. Because if you are too tired, you become not productive, and you are wasting time.

In our million-mile-an-hour culture of never enough, working less is interpreted as working less well. This isn't always the case.

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. I'm looking for a forty-hour day.

We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.

Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep.

We have this cultural obsession with work and productivity as if we're better people if we don't stop and take some time for ourselves.

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it.

We work super hard to not have to work

I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day..." JRR Tolkien, Letter # 174

We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We ought to break our days and our marches into two.

I have succeeded in getting my actual work down to thirty minutes a day. That leaves me eighteen hours for engineering.

Oh, they've been putting in the long hours ... But is that because they don't have the skills, and everything takes twice as long? Or do they put in these hours to avoid what they should be doing ... which is stopping and binning a lot of [their work]?

You have this idea that you'd better keep working otherwise people will forget. And that was dangerous. And then you realize, no, actually if you take a break people might be more interested in you.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

I've gotten much better at multi-tasking. It's hard, though. But, writing a script is not totally focused. You're taking little breaks, all the time. If a kid runs in, you give 'em a horsey ride. It's a pretty fluid process.

Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.

People frequently fail when they try to do everything at once. They approach a massive project and quickly get discouraged. Taking small, but high-value steps takes less time, and you learn more in the long run.

Keeping ridiculous hours doesn't mean you'll be successful.

I can't justify to myself working less, even if you get more out of it. Even though, in practice, it does seem it would be better for me personally.

To work is simple enough; but to rest, there is the difficulty.