A Quote by James Taylor

There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done. — © James Taylor
There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.
Give yourself the gift of uninterrupted time. It can be the first hour of your day. Or the last hour. A lunch hour. You want time free from phone calls, visitors, mail, things to read. Unplug the phone if you have to. Lock your door. Put a sign on it that warns people of the consequences of entering. Do what you have to and watch the results. One hour of uninterrupted time can double a person's productivity for the day.
You've just got to have to put the work in. Put work first. Put the hours in and the time in, and do your job. And when you get a little time off, you can go out and have a little fun. But you have to make sure you get done what you need to get done first off.
I hate being called lazy, so when everybody gets up at half seven in the morning, I'm up at the same time. Everyone goes to work and I'll do a few hours of writing, then I'll mess about for a bit and come back to it. By the time I go home I'm done. I think it's really good to keep that kind of a routine with writing. I find that when I don't do that, it's really hard to get back into that headspace of writing.
Turn off your cell phone. Honestly, if you want to get work done, you’ve got to learn to unplug. No texting, no email, no Facebook, no Instagram. Whatever it is you’re doing, it needs to stop while you write... A lot of the time (and this is fully goofy to admit), I’ll write with earplugs in - even if it’s dead silent at home.
When I was younger, I just put off the writing until later in the day, but now I write early every morning to get it done. I can only write for a few hours at a time; after that, my attention fades.
Put yourself into every situation in training and against every style of bowling, and do that for hours and hours and hours. Then when you get to a match, it's almost instinctive the way you play because you've done it so often in training.
I definitely find my time to be away from my phone because I think that's important, but when it comes to work and friends, I feel like everything is on my phone. I'll, like, leave my phone in my room for a few hours when I need my space.
Writing and producing the show is an intellectual process. Performing the show is far more athletic and intuitive, because you don't get to do it twice. It helps if you've done whatever the old saw is, 10,000 hours of it. Because I've done 10,000 hours of comedy, I have this database in my mind of what works and what doesn't work.
So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it.
Finding balance in life is perhaps the greatest challenge of this generation, especially for women. I've decided that I need to compartmentalize my life better. From the time my kids get home until after dinner, I put my phone away. If I pick it up, my kids call me on it, and I have to put money in the "phone jar." When the phone jar gets full, the kids can spend the money on fun family outings, like going to a movie or going to their favorite restaurant. This unplugged time has helped me to be more mindful and give them my full attention.
At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.
I don't like the sound of my phone ringing so I put my phone inside my fish tank. I can't hear it, but every time I get a call I see the fish go like this >>>
Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps 20 hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for business? To get a 4-year-old ready for school? To return a few phone calls? To load the dishwasher? To fill out some forms?
For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn't expected or predicted by what I supplied. Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop.
For a time I gave the appearance of defending Stalin. I didn't defend what he had done; the fact is, nobody could defend the things that Khrushchev revealed.
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