Noah Baumbach Quotes

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.

The biggest challenge is to stay focused. It's to have the discipline when there are so many competing things.

Cruising the Internet doesn't count as writing. Neither does answering e-mail. Before you check Twitter & FB and do other similar tasks that get in the way of writing, write first. (I really need to take my own advice here!)

When I write, I try to turn my Internet off so I can't procrastinate through the Internet, but then I just get deeply involved in whatever I have just on my computer.

Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren't. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren't applying themselves.

A journalist also needs to be disciplined, and so do I. I am, essentially, lazy. Without discipline I'd be just a mass of gummy bears on the sofa instead of on book tour with my eighth novel.

It's very easy to fool yourself that you're working, you know, when you're really not working very hard. I mean, I'm very lazy. So for me, I would always have an excuse, you know, to go - quit early, go to a museum, you know. So I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job. I keep a schedule.

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.

I procrastinate so much and I get distracted by anything.

I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.

I do occasionally get into that 'checking Twitter every five minutes' state - 'Please, help me avoid my work.' I have a writing room for when I get completely out of control, so I can put myself out of the Internet's reach.

When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.

If you need five minutes every hour to look at tweets or to just surf the Internet, you need to schedule that into your schedule, allow yourself to do that. Because when people start procrastinating, what they've done is, they've tried to ignore that urge. They try to deny themselves time on Facebook or time surfing the web.

The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything.

As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where one of the most needed qualities is patience.

It takes discipline not to let social media steal your time.

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

I couldn't understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn't flying as much.

I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you've got three weeks, and so on.

Here in Seattle, I'm the most productive I've ever been. I don't allow myself personal distractions. I'm extremely disciplined here.

I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.

I'm not a particularly disciplined person in terms of my work habits.

When writers say that they need to 'set the mood' or 'get into the zone', those are all ways to procrastinate. Not prerequisites.

I can't even carpe 15 minutes in a row. So a whole diem is out of the question.