Desk Quotes

Make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someone's been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practice - somewhat contrived, I admit - to write the man's name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself: "That finishes the incident, and so far as I'm concerned, that fellow." The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumbled-up spite and discarded personalities.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use email and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the emails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.