James Surowiecki Quotes

You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.

Free time is the enemy of progress

Say not: “When I have free time I shall study”, for you may perhaps never have any free time

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.

Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy.

Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

Do not say, 'When I have leisure, I will study,' because you may never have leisure.

Time management requires self-discipline, self-mastery and self-control more than anything else.

While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.

This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.

Don't think that you can make up for it by working twice as hard tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, why aren't you doing it now?

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

You really don't have a life when you're working. I always think "oh, I'm gonna see everybody on my days off. I'm gonna read so many books and see so many films" and then three months go by.

What has not wasting time impaired?

I make no secret of the fact that I would rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it. But you have to be efficient if you're going to be lazy.

If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.

I procrastinate so much and I get distracted by anything.

I'm terrible when I have to fill up free time. My days, if I'm not working, I wake up and figure out a way to kill time until it's time to go to sleep.

A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.

You would not believe how much time people waste in a day. And how little time they put into things they genuinely love.