Four hours a day, tops, for maximum creativity

Oliver Burkeman, The three-of-four-hours rule for getting creative work done:

There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.

As I've written before, it's positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn't just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point). [...]

The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to "maximise your time" or "optimise your day", in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.

This feels about right to me. It’s not unusual for me to work 8 to 10 hours (occasionally more) in a day. But the really tough work, whatever it is for that day, is done in 3 or 4 hours. The rest of the time is spent on lesser tasks. Moreover, if I’ve done tough work for three or four days in a row, sometimes I have to take a day off and just putter through the day.

But there’s another side to this. I usually need to have those three or four hours in a single block of time. I can’t break it up in two shorter blocks. It takes time to get into a working “head.” Once I’m there I need to stay there until the energy’s gone. Working into things twice in one day takes up too much time just getting into the right frame of mind.

File this under behavioral mode.

H/t Tyler Cowen.