On Focus

“There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day. As I’ve written before, it’s positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn’t just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point)… The truly valuable skill here isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled. That’s the spirit embodied by one monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, interviewed by the writer Jonathan Malesic for his forthcoming book The End of Burnout, which I’ve been enjoying. The monks’ daily work period lasts (can you guess?) three hours, ending at 12.40pm. Malesic writes: ‘I asked Fr Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defence attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone. “You get over it,” he replied.’”

oliverburkeman.com/fourhours. I’d only add that if you practice this regularly over time you can find longer stretches become possible for five hours or so each day. The other thing that’s missing here is that most creative work is surrounded by other tasks that have to get done for various reasons but aren’t that challenging to accomplish. In university life there is the almost constant tedium of email and spreadsheets, but also other chores depending on your administrative roles that have to be kept at bay. The trick is to get them out of the way when energies are low and you couldn’t do focused work anyway. Work so that the focused concentration is directed to your priority publication each day no matter what else is happening and leverage that momentum to the next day and so on until it’s ready to send out for editorial review. Even if overwhelmed with crises in one day, let it go, and set the goal to protect at least four hours tomorrow knowing the technique works over the long haul.