Quotes & Sayings About Workday

If I have a 12 or 14 hour workday, I am home the next. I cut out anything that is frivolous or doesn't need to be done. — Marcia Cross

Excuse me, Ben," Bowen said. "Am I wrong, or aren't you the corporate treasurer?"
Glisan bristled. "Yes."
"What do you mean, you think you can get one?" Bowen shot back. "This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a maturities schedule!"
But they didn't. With all the focus on deals and earnings- with finance group's transformation into a profit center rather than a division to support the business- the workday, boring details had been sloughed off.
p. 560 — Kurt Eichenwald

Christmas was just another workday, just as it had been growing up in Alabama. In a good year back then, little Robert got a handkerchief and an orange. One year his father fashioned a little cart - although come to think of it that was in the spring, not at Christmastime - and the children took turns being pulled around the yard by the family goat. Then he died. His father and the goat. — Robert M. Edsel

Similarly, some people have a four-lane highway for constant achievement, a striving talent we call achiever. They may not have to win, but they do feel a burning need to achieve something tangible every single day. And these people mean every single day. For them, every day - workday, weekend, vacation - starts at zero. They have to rack up some numbers by the end of the day to feel good about themselves. This burning flame may dwindle as evening comes, but the next morning, it rekindles itself, spurring its host to look for new items to cross off his list. These people are the fabled "self-starters. — Gallup Press

He's been very distracted the last few days."
"Has he now?"
"And short-tempered." Brenna found her appetite coming back. I'm delighted to hear it. I hope he suffers, the donkey's ass."
Brenna went through the rest of her workday whistling, her mood bright and her hands nimble. She supposed it wasn't very charitable of her to take pleasure in the idea of another's unhappiness, but she was human, after all. — Nora Roberts

Don't you feel that at this rate there isn't much in it? In what? In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed - nothing has happened. — Willa Cather

Ironically, you'll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team. Instead of spending the entire day dealing with Urgent!!! emails and disruptive phone calls, you'll have the entire start (or end) of the day to yourself. — Jason Fried

All through the workday something was nagging at the back of his head, and he didn't know what it was. He misplaced things. He forgot things. At one point, he started singing at his desk, not because he was happy, but because he forgot not to. — Neil Gaiman

It struck Linda suddenly that this was the middle of the night. Even here, in the city that never slept, most people now were sleeping. Law firm time was like casino time, only instead of an endless cocktail hour it was always a neon-bright afternoon. The dead center of the workday, all night long. — Tara Conklin

Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off. — Joshua Ferris

I will not serve lunch to anyone in the middle of a workday. I rarely rearrange my furniture or cabinets; once I find a drawer for something, it stays there. I don't garden. And I don't knit. — Christina Baker Kline

A well-paid four-hour workday will increase the number of workers. — Samael Aun Weor

The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious about us and what we're here for. but now in the evening they'd just resent our presence. The workday is over. It's time for supper and family and relaxation and turning inward at home. We ride unnoticed down this empty highway through this strange country I've never seen before, and now a heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness becomes dominant and my spirits wane with the sun. — Robert M. Pirsig

Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency's winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which "fraud" is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody's towering delusions about being exempt. . . — Thomas Pynchon

On the other hand, although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn't going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. — Albert Einstein

I get to focus on something I love to do 24-hours a day rather than trying to squeeze it in between midterms, or even during my normal workday. When I was at Google it was like you wake up at 7 and then you get home by 7 and you start your second job of music. So now I get to focus all my efforts on music, travel and play shows and do all of this stuff. That's the difference - That's all my life is, all day. — Hoodie Allen

Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online. — Winifred Gallagher

We can plan a roadtrip or a workday down to the last detail but the unexpected will always arise. If we are not malleable, we will get left behind. — John Wooden

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. — Anonymous

My workday is non-stop break-neck high stakes and high pressure. Every day. — Hank Phillippi Ryan

A sing-song of shouts filled the air as the merchants tried to attract buyers. Their voices had that end of the workday lift - a false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet coloured by the knowledge that life would not change for them. — Frank Herbert

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated into dayness. — Jonathan Franzen

The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life. — Ayn Rand

You see I still have confidence in you sir, or should I say the artist who dwells within you, the artist who disdains such mundane details as selecting a fresh shirt in the morning, who steps forth into the workday world the rest of us inhabit indifferent to the glances he draws because his shoes fail to match, why? Because his mind has been elsewhere, his inner ear tuned to the sonorous tones of horn and kettledrum, tones it is his sacred duty to let us hear with him. — William Gaddis

I'm never in control of my time during the workday. — Barbara Corcoran

In the earl days of their marriage he had discussed with her every aspect of his workday. They'd discussed their hopes and dreams in whispers so as not to awaken the children sleeping in the next room.
Over the years, other obligations had pulled at them, sometimes taking precedence over this quiet pillow talks. Nancy missed them and longed for the days when he had valued her opinion above all others. He still did, she was sure; he just didn't ask for it as frequently as he had before his success was assured. — Sandra Brown

It will show you that there's a certain amount of irony to life. For example, I started an online business so I could work from home . . . alone. Now I speak to more people in one workday than I used to in an entire month. — Sophia Amoruso

Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop; to free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery. — Samuel Gompers

How do you open the eyes to see how to take the daily, domestic, workday vortex and invert it into the dome of an everyday cathedral? — Ann Voskamp

I have a very beautiful life with great friends and I look forward to waking up every day. Every day is a vacation but every day is a workday. I don't want to take vacations because music is my life and if I escape from music, that's the same thing as death. So a vacation is death to me. Sitting on the beach for a week is my idea of hell. That would kill me. — John Zorn

Working people are working even longer hours, even though we won the eight-hour workday at the Haymarket General Strike in Chicago. — Eric Drooker

Imagine spending an entire workday with your best friend at your side. You would no doubt acknowledge his presence throughout the day by introducing him to your friends or business associates and talking to him about the various activities of the day. But how would your friend feel if you never talked to him or acknowledged his presence? Yet that's how we treat the Lord when we fail to pray. If we communicated with our friends as infrequently as some of us communicate with the Lord, those friends might soon disappear. Our fellowship with God is not meant to wait until we are in heaven. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation "political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker," who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him "in his leisure and humanity," this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. — Guy Debord

True love is but a humble, low born thing,
And hath its food served up in earthenware;
It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand,
Through the every-dayness of this workday world. — James Russell Lowell

Regardless of where the EPZs are located, the workers' stories have a certain mesmerizing sameness: the workday is long- fourteen hours in Sri Lanka, twelve hours in Indonesia, sixteen in Southern China, twelve in the Philippines. The vast majority of the workers are women, always young, always working for contractors or subcontractors from Korea, Taiwan or Hong Kong. The contractors are usually filling orders for companies based in the U.S., Britain, Japan, Germany or Canada. The management is military-style, the supervisors often abusive, the wages below subsistence and the work low-skill and tedious. — Naomi Klein

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday — Charles Petzold

Low lights signal to our senses that the workday may be over and it's time for sleep, making it hard for an audience to pay careful attention. When we stand behind a big wooden podium, it can feel as if there's a shield between us and the audience. — John P. Kotter

A typical workday for me is getting up at about 5:00, 5:15 in the morning, getting some coffee or tea as quickly as possible, and then getting to my desk. And ideally, I'll start writing around 5:30, 5:45, and I'll write for three, four hours, and then I'll take a break, and read over what I write. Maybe about lunchtime, I'll go exercise or get out into the day. Then I'll either read over what I wrote the day before and quit work around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and spend some time with my kids. — Eric Schlosser

The 12-hour workday is not uncommon to anyone anymore. — Jordana Spiro

Training for the Olympics was much easier than balancing my life now! When practice was over, there was time for me. But with four kids and a career, I have no downtime. When I'm not on the road, I finish my workday at 2:30 p.m. Then I pick the kids up from school and they get 100 percent Mommy, not part Mommy and part Mary Lou Retton. — Mary Lou Retton

The typical workday, particularly in startup mode, is from nine to six or nine to seven, then you take a two-hour break to work out and eat dinner. By that time, you're relaxed, and then you work until midnight or one A.M. If there was no break with physical activity, you'd be more tired and less alert. — Aaron Patzer

If you can't bring yourself to encourage employees to lie down on the job, at least give them plenty of breaks. The ordinary fatigue most of us feel during the workday makes us grouchier - and dumber - as the hours go by. — Robert I. Sutton

I hate going out for lunch during a workday because it slows down my pace and ruins my rhythm. I prefer to eat at my desk. Actually, I wander around the design studio with a plate in my hand as I dine on, for example, salmon sashimi and a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella. I often have a bit of dark chocolate after lunch. — Tom Ford

King Solomon set out on a course to work and live without reference to God at all. He concluded that without God in the picture, work is empty.- (Ecc. 2:11) ... The path to really enjoying your job is to have a warm personal relationship with your Lord and Savior and to make Him the controlling center of each workday. — Doug Sherman

TV is so seductive with a great workday. You're going to work and making people laugh, and that's fantastic. — Jillian Bach

Outside of the usual bar or nightclub, it's not every day that I get a drink bought for me-at least not by strangers and certainly not on a workday. On that Saturday, in September 2010, it was from three separate individuals. — Jason Leclerc

When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the "serving size" listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size ... — Anne Tyler

On the TV screen right now, it's 1975, and Jimmy Page is playing like a man who answers to nobody. A man existing in that seductive state of extended adolescence that rock legends bask in, a man connected to something in the universe larger than even the sum total of the legendary Led Zeppelin, playing guitar because that is so clearly what he was put here to do. And it's wrong to expect that kind of divine moment to last forever, and to expect an artist to stay in 1975. Fact is, ten minutes ago I saw the guy onscreen right downstairs, coming off the trading floor of the stock exchange with a banker carrying his guitar cases for him. I sit cross-legged on the floor on a workday staring into my cereal bowl, thinking about how we all change. We all grow up. We all move on, one way or another, whether we want to or not. — Dan Kennedy

If you can swing it, getting arrested is the high point of the Fourth of July. Also, the reading of the Declaration of Independence is exciting. (Yes, the Declaration was written two years after Essex is officially set. No, this doesn't stop us.) [ ... ] Essex stayed open late that night, for the holiday. Our patriotism cannot be constrained by an eight-hour workday. — Leila Sales

You're not very good at this," Emma said, laughing at the frustration on Sean's face.
He pulled his hand out from under the back of her T-shirt. "You're distracting me."
"How am I distracting you?" She shook the bag at Sean, reminding him to pull two letter tiles to replace the C and the T he'd used to make CAT.
"You look totally hot. And you did it on purpose so I wouldn't be able to concentrate and you'd win."
Emma laughed. Sure, she'd thrown on baggy flannel boxers and an old Red Sox T-shirt after her shower just to seduce him out of triple-word scores. "You not having a shirt on is distracting. And you keep pretending you want to rub my back so you can peek at my tile rack."
"Nothing wrong with checking out your rack." He craned his neck to see better and she shoved him away. It wasn't easy playing Scrabble sitting side by side on the couch, but after a long workday, neither was willing to take the floor. — Shannon Stacey

A survey of high-earning professionals in the corporate world found that 62 percent work more than fifty hours a week and 10 percent work more than eighty hours per week.18 Technology, while liberating us at times from the physical office, has also extended the workday. A 2012 survey of employed adults showed that 80 percent of the respondents continued to work after leaving the office, 38 percent checked e-mail at the dinner table, and 69 percent can't go to bed without checking their in-box.19 — Sheryl Sandberg

The idea that because the school day is shorter or the school year is shorter than the sort of white collar workday or work year, that does not actually capture how teachers spend their time. — Dana Goldstein

My creative workday starts with strong breakfast tea and a few minutes of journaling, both of which help me get my head in the story. So much of story-building for me involves immersing myself in the character and situation I'll be working on, just the way an actor does when playing a role. — Therese Fowler

My books promised me that life wasn't just made up of workday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that. — Laura Amy Schlitz

It happened in Chicago in 1886.
On the first of May, strikes paralyzed cities across the country. The Philadelphia Tribune offered a diagnosis: 'The labor element has been bitten by a kind of universal tarantula - it has gone dancing mad.'
Dancing mad were the workers who fought for the eight-hour day and for the right to form unions
...
On every May first, the entire world remembers them. With the passing of time, constitutions, laws, and international accords have proved them right.
But some of the most powerful corporations have yet to find out. They outlaw unions and keep track of the workday with those melting clocks painted by Salvador Dali. — Eduardo Galeano

I'm not going to pick her up and carry her screaming to the basement," Trent said. "It's a workday. Besides, she has a crutch."
"Crutch or no, she's hurt!" Ceri protested.
"I mean," Trent said intently, "she can hit me with it if I do something she doesn't like. — Kim Harrison

Multi-tasking is great in the kitchen when you are trying to time the chicken to be ready at the same time as the potatoes. But do not assume it is a great way to manage a workday. — Joanne Tombrakos

It sometimes feels like the workplace is immune from social upheaval. We go to work and do the best we can, and at the end of the day, we return to our lives. We don't abandon who we are, however, when we begin and end our workday. Who we are shapes how we are perceived in the workplace and, in turn, how we perform in the workplace. — Roxane Gay

I spent the rest of the workday on routine paperwork, snarling at misplaced files and seething at the stupidity of everyone else's report writing
when did Grammar die? — Jeff Lindsay

A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time. — Graydon Carter

the first businesses in the United States to implement Owen's 8-hour day was the Ford Motor Company. In 1914, it not only cut the standard workday to eight hours, but it also doubled its workers' pay in the process. To the shock of many at the time, this resulted in a significant increase in productivity, and Ford's profit margins doubled within two years of implementation. — Steven P. MacGregor

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee. — Aaron Levie

Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it's captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you're done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, "Shutdown complete"). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it's safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day. — Cal Newport

Christian socialism"). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call "state capitalism. — Jonah Goldberg

If you squander on a holyday, you will want on a workday unless you have been sparing. — Plautus

One thing I have to give Christians; were it not for Sunday, every day of the week would be a workday. — Lex Allen

I am excited to join the Workday Board at an exciting time in the company's growth and look forward to leveraging my past experience as a technologist and entrepreneur to provide advice as they continue to look at new areas of growth. — Jerry Yang

I was treated better than others, simply because there was so much public attention. In my case, they did adhere to the eight-hour workday required by law. The other women were often forced to slave away for up to 16 hours a day. — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toin and suffering. — Jeff Lindsay

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance. — Ben Lerner

I like the spreads - designing them is a welcome challenge - but for a dyed-in-the-wool page-a-day journeyman like me, it can be tough to leave a drawing unfinished at the end of the workday. — Stuart Immonen

To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. To throw away books after reading them so theydon't have to be dusted. To go through boxes on New Year's Eve and throw out half of what is inside. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of flowers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life. — Maxine Hong Kingston