Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Four Hours of Concentration

johndcook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 93 posts

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#51

Post by 1123581321 »

axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

Thanks for being "that guy." I think that your day probably has one or two peaks in it where you do your best work, and the rest is more low energy work (not bad, just not the most effective work on tough stuff.) Also, not all hard workers are created equally, so among those who do hard work, some can do more than others. I agree they become more successful but I do not agree their working habits can always be duplicated.

I certainly agree it is tempting to read about four hours of concentration and use the article to justify four hours of mediocre work.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#52

Post by hyperbovine »

realitygrill wrote: post #49

I first read about the ~4 hour limit from D.E. Littlewood's book, Littlewood's Miscellany. He recommends "four hours a day or at most five, with breaks about every hour (for walks perhaps)." Since then I've read of luminaries mentioning this in passing, but I haven't really tried to employ it. (I'm also pretty sure I've seen pg say this is empirically false with YC founders, and perhaps he and axiom are correct) I'd…

Littlewood was a talented mathematician; pg is an employer of computer programmers. Unless you are doing original research, which, AFAIK, most YC companies aren't, I see no reason why you should limit yourself to 4 hours a day. (Apart from having a life, but that's a separate debate.)

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#53

Post by SilasX »

jdietrich wrote: post #50
axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

I think you define "strenuous" quite weakly. The overwhelming majority of jobs don't require very much cognitive effort, even in software. Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work. Proving theorems is a completely different class of work to chipping away at your failed unit tests or knocking together a CRUD app in your favourite language. Maybe a tenth of one percent…

>Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work.

I might agree with that in an absolute sense. But if we're going to talk about percentiles, and relative to the human population, very few people (percentage-wise) can even do the "easy, boring" part of programming you're referring to.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#54

Post by rwallace »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #44

Pure curiosity from the perspective of life hacking: Does this mean we can have e.g. 3 tasks parallel in a day where 3x4hours = 12 hours? Say you want to write high quality code, mastering piano and write symphony at the same day, until you reach 10k hour each (=mastery).

No. But it does mean you can do two tasks in a day if one of them doesn't require a lot of concentration or mental effort, e.g. four hours programming and four hours gardening.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#55

Post by rwallace »

axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

I believe you were sitting at your desk pressing keys for sixteen hours a day. I also believe you believe you were accomplishing more than you would have at your desk for six hours a day.

It's been shown what actually happens in such a scenario is that your judgment quickly becomes impaired to the point where you are no longer capable of judging how impaired you are; it's the equivalent of being permanently drunk. To be sure, you can still press keys. If the work you're given is far enough below your peak ability, you may even eventually blunder your way into a solution. (Or you may not; last I checked, the failure rate of software projects is still several tens of percent, and stupid hours feature prominently in most of the failures.) But the calendar time to get your job done is longer, not shorter, than it would have been with an intelligent schedule. Degrading yourself like that is nothing to be proud of, and it does nothing but harm to your work as well as yourself.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#56

Post by saraid216 »

axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

How many of you are over 25 years old?

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#57

Post by Detrus »

SilasX wrote: post #53
jdietrich wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you define "strenuous" quite weakly. The overwhelming majority of jobs don't require very much cognitive effort, even in software. Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work. Proving theorems is a completely different class of work to chipping away at your failed unit tests or knocking together a CRUD app in your favourite language. Maybe a tenth of one percent…

>Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work. I might agree with that in an absolute sense. But if we're going to talk about percentiles, and relative to the human population, very few people (percentage-wise) can even do the "easy, boring" part of programming you're referring to.

It is hard to learn. But once you learn it, not that hard to do CRUD day to day. When you have to learn some new framework/library it gets harder again.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#59

Post by wpietri »

rwallace wrote: post #55
axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

I believe you were sitting at your desk pressing keys for sixteen hours a day. I also believe you believe you were accomplishing more than you would have at your desk for six hours a day. It's been shown what actually happens in such a scenario is that your judgment quickly becomes impaired to the point where you are no longer capable of judging how impaired you are; it's the equivalent of being permanently drunk. To…

Absolutely. When I've seen things like this in person, the reality is often, "I worked 16 hour days for 2 months coding, and then spent another 2 months in QA fixing bugs."

People say that like I'm supposed to be impressed, but they don't seem to realize that programmers can be negatively productive. In 10 minutes of stupid, I can put in a bug that soaks up a day of somebody's time later on. But the people proud of their death marches act as if the bugs are all caused by cosmic rays, not their own previous exhausted fumblings, miscommunications, typos, and oversights.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#60

Post by [deleted] »

axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN