There seem to have been a few individuals who could work hard for more than 4 hours a day: Proust (who took vast amounts of caffeine tablets and died at 51), Erdos (who used amphetamines), Richard Stallman who was and is a super motivated individual.
In the book daily rituals, about high achievers, few worked more than 4 hours on their core hard work e.g. writing novels, science etc. You would think if it were possible to work productively at the top level more than that, someone would do it and blow away the competition.
I would be interested in any others, or any evidence that people in general can do more than 4 hours at the top level. Possibly a nap after 3 hours can get you another 30-60 minutes. This was from the violinists study that Cal Newport (I think) referred to.
In general people tend to initially find the 4 hour limit a big problem. My response is to ask people to get back to me when they are consistently doing the 4 hours and we will see how it can be extended. They tend to find it is very hard to get to 4 hours.
1. 4 hours a day has been widely reported as the limit
2. The book Daily Rituals reports high achievers doing 4 hours really hard work a day.
3. Personal experience. Steep drop off after more than 4 hours; burnout after a few days much over 4 hours, etc.
4. Very few examples of people going over that number sustainably.
I suggest people track this themselves and see what happens.
I find I can get to 4.5-5 hours maybe with a lunchtime nap. Maybe much more with lots of micro-naps (doze in chair for 5 minutes).
Currently I am experimenting with turning 24 hours into two days with a long nap in the middle. I am having trouble doing this though.
N.B. This is not 4 hours of any kind of work. This is work at the maximum of intellectual effort e.g. deliberate practice, learning to ride a bicycle, memorizing vocabulary with Anki decks, practising a foreign language at the limit of your comprehension, trying to prove theorems, doing exercises on a hard scientific subject you are learning, writing at the top level of quality and/or on difficult topics, etc.
Follow up on Herbert Simon. From his book “Models of my life”
Worked 60-80 hours a week. But does not detail what “work” means.
When collaborating with someone he comments that most of his day’s work would be usually done by 10am, about the time his collaborator would be getting started. This perhaps hints that early in the day he did a few hours of really hard intellectual work.
What HS regarded as hard work may differ from other people. For example he learned about 20 languages to the point of being able to read papers, and 4-5 to the level of reading literature. But he regarded this as a fun/hobby thing.
He had a problem of hobbies turning into work, and had to drop several of them (e.g. playing musical instruments).
At college he only did enough work to get graded at A. Early on he spent too much time playing ping-pong and his grades slipped.
He published ~1,000 papers and 37 books and accrued to date over 350,000 citations. So he was amazingly productive.
He spent a lot of time on office politics and other managerial and administrative things.
He found writing easy and so wrote many/most of the papers he was a collaborator on.
Conclusion: HS was very smart, very productive, found things that were challenging for others to be fun/hobbies, and while it seems he did work long hours, it is not clear how much time he spent at the highest level of effort. There are hints he did concentrate his top tier work in the first few hours of the day.
In this interview, Don Knuth gives the strong impression that he works more than 4 hours a day not necessarily doing deliberate practice but definitely hard cognitive work (writing a book that most people consider quite challenging to read). That said, Knuth is kind of a monster in general in terms of combining really high technical ability and really high conscientiousness, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s similar to the other outliers you mentioned and is not representative.
A few examples to back up my conscientiousness point:
The following story about doing all the problems in the textbook (from that interview):
But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first.
Writing an entire compiler on his own over a summer.
Finishing his PhD in three years while also consulting with Burroughs.
There seem to have been a few individuals who could work hard for more than 4 hours a day: Proust (who took vast amounts of caffeine tablets and died at 51), Erdos (who used amphetamines), Richard Stallman who was and is a super motivated individual.
In the book daily rituals, about high achievers, few worked more than 4 hours on their core hard work e.g. writing novels, science etc. You would think if it were possible to work productively at the top level more than that, someone would do it and blow away the competition.
I would be interested in any others, or any evidence that people in general can do more than 4 hours at the top level. Possibly a nap after 3 hours can get you another 30-60 minutes. This was from the violinists study that Cal Newport (I think) referred to.
In general people tend to initially find the 4 hour limit a big problem. My response is to ask people to get back to me when they are consistently doing the 4 hours and we will see how it can be extended. They tend to find it is very hard to get to 4 hours.
is there a reason you’re anchoring at 4 hours in particular?
Why 4 hours?
1. 4 hours a day has been widely reported as the limit
2. The book Daily Rituals reports high achievers doing 4 hours really hard work a day.
3. Personal experience. Steep drop off after more than 4 hours; burnout after a few days much over 4 hours, etc.
4. Very few examples of people going over that number sustainably.
I suggest people track this themselves and see what happens.
I find I can get to 4.5-5 hours maybe with a lunchtime nap. Maybe much more with lots of micro-naps (doze in chair for 5 minutes).
Currently I am experimenting with turning 24 hours into two days with a long nap in the middle. I am having trouble doing this though.
N.B. This is not 4 hours of any kind of work. This is work at the maximum of intellectual effort e.g. deliberate practice, learning to ride a bicycle, memorizing vocabulary with Anki decks, practising a foreign language at the limit of your comprehension, trying to prove theorems, doing exercises on a hard scientific subject you are learning, writing at the top level of quality and/or on difficult topics, etc.
Having said all that, there is a crying need for more work in this area.
The current lead I am following up is Herbert Simon. Will also check out Knuth.
Someone suggested Flaubert, who worked 12 hours a day. And produced 0.7 (really well honed) words per hour.
Follow up on Herbert Simon. From his book “Models of my life”
Worked 60-80 hours a week. But does not detail what “work” means.
When collaborating with someone he comments that most of his day’s work would be usually done by 10am, about the time his collaborator would be getting started. This perhaps hints that early in the day he did a few hours of really hard intellectual work.
What HS regarded as hard work may differ from other people. For example he learned about 20 languages to the point of being able to read papers, and 4-5 to the level of reading literature. But he regarded this as a fun/hobby thing.
He had a problem of hobbies turning into work, and had to drop several of them (e.g. playing musical instruments).
At college he only did enough work to get graded at A. Early on he spent too much time playing ping-pong and his grades slipped.
He published ~1,000 papers and 37 books and accrued to date over 350,000 citations. So he was amazingly productive.
He spent a lot of time on office politics and other managerial and administrative things.
He found writing easy and so wrote many/most of the papers he was a collaborator on.
Conclusion: HS was very smart, very productive, found things that were challenging for others to be fun/hobbies, and while it seems he did work long hours, it is not clear how much time he spent at the highest level of effort. There are hints he did concentrate his top tier work in the first few hours of the day.
In this interview, Don Knuth gives the strong impression that he works more than 4 hours a day not necessarily doing deliberate practice but definitely hard cognitive work (writing a book that most people consider quite challenging to read). That said, Knuth is kind of a monster in general in terms of combining really high technical ability and really high conscientiousness, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s similar to the other outliers you mentioned and is not representative.
A few examples to back up my conscientiousness point:
The following story about doing all the problems in the textbook (from that interview):
Writing an entire compiler on his own over a summer.
Finishing his PhD in three years while also consulting with Burroughs.