Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
plumshell.com

To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.

Highly job and person dependent I suspect.

I have been struggling with organising my time as well, and I found that fewer hours every day means I only focus on what's important, and I can achieve a state of flow, with a good routine, every day. I do 4 hours of 95% effort, no distraction deep work, and then I need to recharge the batteries.

It all depends if you're doing creative programming work, or menial one. I'm building a business, and the software underneath it. It's not too dissimilar to sculpting or painting: bursts of intense work, with tons of space necessary to digest, plan the next step or just daydream and think out of the box around hard problems. Some people thrive in a brute force approach to creativity (work until the problem is solved), for others intuition is the driving force (think until the problem is solved)

The issue is that as a society and the corporate machine is tuned for the brute force approach. We celebrate the 100 hours/wk Musks and Carmacks, and forget that their physiology, and more importantly, environment is much different than most of us.

How many hours do you think Musk spends thinking about paying rent, cost of living, standups with a boring boss, endless Zoom calls that cut into his focus? How many hours does John Carmack spend, bored to tears, plugging yet another Slack library into their CRUD app for a boss than makes 500x his salary?

How many hours of "brainstorming", daydreaming and reading up on exciting tech do they count as work? How many hours of daydreaming and "digesting" can you do sat in an open space cubicle?

(Sorry, started talking about creative force, and went on a societal critique.)

I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend.

Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.

I think the appeal of "3 hours a day" is that the number is so extremely low compared to the number 8. But I don't think that it will work. Flexible time models also give you a pretty good work-life balance, and they're more realistic. I mean, for one, you won't find an employer who will follow this 3-hour model, so we're only talking about self-employed workers. But even then, it has to be a pure coding or other desk job - if it involved e.g. any meetings at all, how are you going to fit that into your small time budget of three hours only per day?

Yeah, like I said, I don't think that this model is going to work in most situations and for most people.