Quotes About Focus

Where I feel the most productive and engaged is when I'm buried in code, buried in some project, tweaking some designs. I'm certainly introverted.

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.

One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus. One call on your cell phone, one tweet, one instant message can destroy your schedule, forcing you to move meetings, or blow off really important things, like love, and friendship.

I have no interest in Twitter or Twotter or Twatter. It would never occur to me to use it. People who Tweet during programmes are always asking, 'What happened then?' If you're bloody Twittering away all the time, you miss what is actually going on.

I'm always amazed by people who blog all the time and tweet all the time, and still get things done. I don't know how they do it.

All that time that we spend tweeting our thoughts and emotions to our next of kin, we could be writing the great American novel, starting a business, or just living.

No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.

If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.

When I was twelve, I heard about the National Theater School, and I told my parents, 'That's what I want to do.' And that was it.

Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.

My mind is constantly creating and searching, but I can't make myself put the right words on paper until I'm ready. Once I'm ready, I'm a focused, disciplined writer who will put in twelve hours a day at the computer, but I also spend a lot of time away from the computer getting to that point.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.

I don't understand people who spend their twenties hanging out in bars and going to football game. That stuff is so boring compared to really applying yourself to what you do.

When I played for Boston Breakers in my early twenties, I really stepped up my training, which meant running drills until you're sick.

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

It's very rare that a person, especially in his twenties and thirties, can do more than one business and do it well.

My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.

If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.

Hell, if I didn't drink drink or smoke, I'd win twenty games every year. It's easy when you don't drink or smoke or horse around.

I practiced for at least two hours every day for twenty years, before then I practiced maybe four to five hours a day, and before then 14 hours a day. It was all I had ever done.

I think I started to have thoughts to really want to be serious about my work when I was about twenty-five, and I just kind of started to look into that direction and moved into it.

Twenty-five minutes is a long time to stay focused. It's really something I had to work on to go in there and not get complacent for 2 seconds or 5 seconds or 1 second. That's all it takes.

I'm the kind of player who is never satisfied on the pitch. If I score twice, I'm already thinking about getting a third one.

If you want to accomplish twice as much, you have to work twice as hard.