Four Hours of Concentration
johndcook.com
Four Hours of Concentration
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Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#2...of course, most people (including myself) may be incapable of the intense concentration that a genius like Poincaré could muster. Therefore, it's hard to know how useful this fact is to a typical person.
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#3If you practice something 4 hours per day, 365 days per year, you'll hit the legendary 10,000 hour mark in about 6 years and 10 months.
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Does this mean that each of us has a reservoir of about 4 hours of intense concentration per day? When we perform a less-intense task, like driving or facebooking, are we using those 4 hours at a reduced rate?
This sounds like it could feed into another idea - that each human has a limited number of actions per day. Performing actions costs concentration, and so we pay for each action from our concentration reservoir?
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#4That's what I have always said about law. I can do about 4 hours of legal work a day. Then I am absolutely done. I have no idea how my colleagues can clock in 8 hours.
Yes - there are days I can do more. But there are also days I do less than 4 hours. In the long run I do about 4 hours a day. That's it.
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#5This echoes my experience as well, however I prefer to break it into 3 x 80 minute blocks. The times when I've tried to push myself beyond that for a short period of time (a few weeks) I have ended up sick, ill or entirely unproductive to make up for it.
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#6I'm a proponent of this theory, and it worked for me in Law School. I would only study for two two hour sessions each day, after which I was free to do whatever I wanted. This worked quite well for me, and I always felt fresh and sharp, especially when finals came around.
I also did the same study plan for the bar exam and feel like it worked well there too, i.e. passed it on the first try with a minimum of drama, the whole thing was actually quite pleasant.
In contrast, many of my peers would study basically around the clock, pull all nighters, made their lives miserable and didn't do any better, and more often than not quite worse.
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#7That's what I have always said about law. I can do about 4 hours of legal work a day. Then I am absolutely done. I have no idea how my colleagues can clock in 8 hours. Yes - there are days I can do more. But there are also days I do less than 4 hours. In the long run I do about 4 hours a day. That's it.
Your colleagues likely work 4 like you, then bill for 8. Scott Adams (maker of Dilbert) once said this is extremely common in the corporate world, and my experience largely agrees. Much of the other 4 hours may be spent in meetings, lunches, relocating, gossiping, or internet browsing. You're largely paid to be on-site and aware for 40 hours a week, not to necessarily produce anything.
One of Adams' books has a story about someone who took 2 simultaneous jobs at one company. He would show up early on one floor, then take an early lunch and head upstairs to his other job, where they thought he was just arriving late. The employer did eventually catch on, but until then he was paid 16 hours of work for 8 hours of his time.
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#8Back in the old days when I was in school, I didn't do well with more than 3 classes in a row in college. Not just me though, nearly everyone started with 2 Tu-Th 1.5 hr classes and 2 M-W-F 1 hr classes. That was a full time 12 unit load, but I always took at least 16 units, and sometimes as many as 24, which was up to 3 more classes a week. 16 units was a full time job, the semesters I took 20 and 24 were very special cases where some of the classes were subjects I already knew well or were research project based classes. I think 16 is a good solid load for the typical college student.
When I'm really refreshed and interested and doing well and eating right I can pull all nighters and maintain work quality. I can't maintain this for extended stretches at all though.
For a sustained pace though, I agree completely with Mr. Cook and his sources that 4 solid hours a day is about right.
There are many people who put in substantially more hours and brag about it. A close look though nearly always reveals lots of meetings, busy work, and - these days - surfing the net, playing games, and flirting or shooting the breeze with coworkers. Remove all that and you seldom see more than 4 hours, and almost never 4 hours of solid work sustained for months at a time.
We should also consider whether this discussion is relevant to calls to extend school hours to 7 or 8 or more hours a day in the primary school classroom, as many are calling for. Does Finland, which has fewer school hours than the US, have better results because of it?
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#9By and large I agree with this, but I think there is another element to consider, which is your overall energy levels. If you exercise, eat right, laugh, spend time with family and friends, then you're more likely to be able to consistently put in this kind of effort. I don't think you can or should aim to do much more than 4, but I think a very large proportion of the world isn't capable of even coming close to 4, because they don't or can't manage their energy effectively.
I also agree it is possible to do longer bursts, but that is pretty rare in my experience.
Re: Four Hours of Concentration
#10That's what I have always said about law. I can do about 4 hours of legal work a day. Then I am absolutely done. I have no idea how my colleagues can clock in 8 hours. Yes - there are days I can do more. But there are also days I do less than 4 hours. In the long run I do about 4 hours a day. That's it.
Your colleagues likely work 4 like you, then bill for 8. Scott Adams (maker of Dilbert) once said this is extremely common in the corporate world, and my experience largely agrees. Much of the other 4 hours may be spent in meetings, lunches, relocating, gossiping, or internet browsing. You're largely paid to be on-site and aware for 40 hours a week, not to necessarily produce anything. One of Adams' books has a story…
> You're largely paid to be on-site and aware for 40 hours a week, not to necessarily produce anything
This really bugged me early on in my career before I understood this. When I started work I would feel disappointed that I couldn't be productive for 8 hours per day. Then I realised that no one else around me was getting probably more than 3 hours of work done in a day so I set my aim for each day at 4 hours of productivity and used a timer to track my concentration time.
I still feel conflicted by it though. When I was freelancing, I tried doubling my rate with the expectation that I would only work 20 hours per week. I think most people thought I was lazy and wouldn't go for it. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to move away from the idea that a 40+ hour work week is ideal.