1. The book “daily rituals”, and references therein. People at the apex of achievement seem to work—at maximum intensity, not drone tier busy work—not much more than 4 hours a day. You would think that if it were possible to do more someone would, and they would surpass them.
The typical day would be 4 hours of damn hard creative work, 4 hours of taking care of business, 4 hours of fun. A good life.
2. I go looking for exceptions that do work really hard (deliberate practice hard) and they are few and far between. They seem either to burn out (Proust—died in his early 50s) or use serious drugs (Erdos—amphetamines) or seriously affect their health (Richard Stallman).
3. That study that I can’t find right now that the violinists that made it practiced for about 4-5 hours a day. They were able to eke out an extra hour by napping in the middle.
4. My own experience. OK I am not that young anymore but 4 hours a day knocks me out. I am very happy to achieve 4 hours a day. I have been tracking this and average about 2.5/day, gradually going up
When people hear about the 4 hours thing they tend to think it is far too low. My advice to people is to try to get to 4 hours and *then* worry about going past it. If you can actually work maximally hard for 4 hours a day you will kill it. If you try to go past the 4 hours your brain will find ways to “procrastinate”.
Also note that IMHO you cannot “carry forward” the 4 hours. Use it or lose it. At least that is my experience. Maybe you can do 3,5,4, etc but not much more, not 2,6,0,8.
I am interested in any other exceptions apart from the ones I listed above.
I would emphasise that you can be productive for far more than 4 hours a day. For example doing routine clerical work. But there does seem to limits on work at deliberate practice level or above. If you disagree, install Anki on your phone and download or make a deck of some things you are interested in memorizing. Keep adding cards until you have done 4 hours according to Anki (clock time may be 50% longer as you goofed off at various times without realizing it). Now do this for a week and report back.
Often people will say they practice violin for 6 hours, but you will usually find that there is a lot of down time in there.
Why I believe this
1. The book “daily rituals”, and references therein. People at the apex of achievement seem to work—at maximum intensity, not drone tier busy work—not much more than 4 hours a day. You would think that if it were possible to do more someone would, and they would surpass them.
The typical day would be 4 hours of damn hard creative work, 4 hours of taking care of business, 4 hours of fun. A good life.
2. I go looking for exceptions that do work really hard (deliberate practice hard) and they are few and far between. They seem either to burn out (Proust—died in his early 50s) or use serious drugs (Erdos—amphetamines) or seriously affect their health (Richard Stallman).
3. That study that I can’t find right now that the violinists that made it practiced for about 4-5 hours a day. They were able to eke out an extra hour by napping in the middle.
4. My own experience. OK I am not that young anymore but 4 hours a day knocks me out. I am very happy to achieve 4 hours a day. I have been tracking this and average about 2.5/day, gradually going up
When people hear about the 4 hours thing they tend to think it is far too low. My advice to people is to try to get to 4 hours and *then* worry about going past it. If you can actually work maximally hard for 4 hours a day you will kill it. If you try to go past the 4 hours your brain will find ways to “procrastinate”.
Also note that IMHO you cannot “carry forward” the 4 hours. Use it or lose it. At least that is my experience. Maybe you can do 3,5,4, etc but not much more, not 2,6,0,8.
I am interested in any other exceptions apart from the ones I listed above.
I would emphasise that you can be productive for far more than 4 hours a day. For example doing routine clerical work. But there does seem to limits on work at deliberate practice level or above. If you disagree, install Anki on your phone and download or make a deck of some things you are interested in memorizing. Keep adding cards until you have done 4 hours according to Anki (clock time may be 50% longer as you goofed off at various times without realizing it). Now do this for a week and report back.
Often people will say they practice violin for 6 hours, but you will usually find that there is a lot of down time in there.