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 this either. I'll go further and say that a large number of the people who complain about having to work more than a few hours a day are doing nothing more than rationalizing their lazy HN and/or reddit habits.
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 of software developers routinely do work that is intellectually on a par with mathematical research; The rest are for the most part skilled tradesmen, doing work they understand relatively well.
It is universally accepted that all but the most prodigious musicians do not benefit from more than 4 or 5 hours of practice a day. They can often easily do twelve or sixteen hours a day, but the extra time is simply wasted. Once your reserves of concentration are spent, you're just going through the motions without learning anything. Most conservatories go to great lengths to persuade their students to practice less, because young musicians are often convinced that they can attain mastery through sheer force of effort.
I can sit and transcribe or arrange parts all day long. I can play from sheet music until my hands give out, all the while daydreaming about what I'm having for tea or what chores need doing. I can't usefully improvise or compose for more than about two hours at a time, or more than four hours in a day. I can feel the point at which I start playing familiar riffs rather than truly improvising; When I've run out of ideas and I'm just writing pastiche. There are composers who claim to do regular eight-hour days, but when you look deeper they invariably spend most of that day arranging or transcribing or recording into the computer, stuff that's essentially just admin.
I'd be shocked if those 12-16 hours you apparently put in for "weeks on end" are truly your most productive. They may certainly feel "mentally strenuous," but that doesn't mean your cognitive limit isn't decreasing as the days and weeks go on.
I find that I can focus intensely for shorter bursts over a couple hours, but then I hit my limit and need to push the really hard stuff aside for a while. Sure, I can crank through a ton of tedious or menial tasks (and there are certainly plenty of them), but that's really not the same.
When I complain about being expected to sit around for 8, 9, 10 hours a day (and I do occasionally complain), it's not because I'm rationalizing lazy habits or want to get out of work. I love my work.
No -- It's because in only 3-4 of those hours I will finish 90% of what I ultimately get done in a day. The trick is in knowing how to optimize those hours of productivity, and when to go home and give your brain time to decompress.
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.
If I were to hire someone, and he claimed he can put in 12-16 hour days for weeks on end, I'd be inclined not to hire, based on the expectation that it means that he's either bullshitting me, or does not understand his own limits.
In 17 years of managing many dozen staff, mostly developers admittedly, in a variety of different settings, I've never seen a someone that managed to be productive with mentally strenuous even a full 8 hour day at a time other than very occasionally when they're on a roll. Generally, the ones that do best are those who manage to spread out their work, take proper breaks and intersperse the rest of their mentally demanding work with "menial" tasks, and who goes home and puts their work away completely.
Maybe your're an exception, but if you are, be prepared that people will either disbelieve you or expect you to prove it. More likely, your idea of "sustained 12-16 hour days" only actually involves a few hours of what the rest of us would consider mentally strenuous work a day.
Put in 12-16 hour days for a while with repetitive, simple tasks taking most of the time when working on something that is overall exciting, sure, that works for a while (though eventually that too tends to produce burnout - I've had to order developers home after the strain starter producing negative results with fewer hours than that).
For me, what works best is that whenever I feel that my concentration is slipping, if I don't feel I have time for a proper break, I will switch to mindless tasks, such as updating my todo list (often spending time breaking bigger tasks into tasks that are realistically small enough for windows of a couple of hours), doing my e-mail, or if I'm home I'll do the housework, and I'll try to "switch off" while I do, practicing mindfulness meditation for the truly "mindless" tasks such as cleaning.
Sometimes I get lucky, and my concentration stays on top for longer in one go, and I cherish those moments, but I "pay" afterwards (e.g. crash on the sofa when I get home, or need to slow down the following day).
I'm sure you're working hard on demanding things, but a world-class violinist is probably doing something much, much harder than you are. Even if you don't respect violinists, surely you have to respect that an expert mathematician trying to make a new discovery is working on problems much harder than anyone in the corporate world. So I don't think this article applies to you, or other people working long hours either, or to people who should be working long hours.
What is a typical day for you? You are a founder so I assume your day is broken up into many different roles. This is very different from a programmer or writer who is focused on doing basically one thing for his whole work day. Do you have any health issues?
> Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline
I think many of us have done this here. What I've noticed from doing this is I start to make lots of mistakes that I wouldn't normally. At a certain point, this turns into a vicious cycle where I think slower and make more mistakes so I need to work more to fix them.
Maybe you're superman and can really work all those extra hours at full concentration...but probably not.
Here's an easy way you can check. Use a timer and throughout the day start the timer when you are going into work that requires full concentration and then stop it when you're done or someone interrupts you or you need to go to the bathroom or you break off from your task. Meetings and emails don't count.
I think you may be missing most interesting point of article which is about the cognitive limits of enhancing skill through deliberate practice.
There was an academic paper a few years back "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" ( a nice summary here - http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...). The paper breaks down 3 types of activity: work, play and deliberate practice. Work is exercising skills you already know; Play is creativity, fun, exploration; Deliberate practice is building a skill - where expertise is achieved through focused training in a particular skill. The article suggests there is evidence that it takes about 10yrs to acheive expert status in a skill. Malcom Gladwell introduced a similar topic through pop-sci writing "Outliers" - suggesting there was evidence that becoming an expert required 10k hrs of practice.
To me, practice requires the absolute most concentration - unlike 'work', with 'deliberate practice', by definition, you can't supplement skill with experience for efficiency.. to learn you have to evolve skill from more experiences. And I believe thats why the linked articuled a 'cognitive limit' of 4 hours by way of a violinist practicing in spurts of 2x2hrs=4hrs per day.
The last paragraph in the article talks about "four hours of intense concentration per day", and I'm not sure I buy that abstraction because "concentrating" and "training" are 2 different things. The author (and interviewee) is inferring that concentration is the constraint, but I'd suggest its more likely learning/trainability speed constraint.
So, a different interpretation, but I may be agreeing with you own observations. I think deliberate practice shows an upper bound for cognitive limit - but in the sense of new patterns being formed in the brain. I don't think deliberate practice necessarily shows the upper bound for concentration based on the information presented.
Anecdotal example: I used to work for a small company where the programmers did both algorithmic design and the implementation. Looking back on that work, I could write code to sling bits from point A to point B all day (and did the 12-16 hour weeks you mentioned for months on end). But there is no way in hell I could do algorithm design for 12+ hours a day for weeks on end. It's extremely dense work. There's no mental breaks while waiting for the linker to run, or long stretches of babysitting the program in the debugger, or breaks of mechanically typing out something you've already thought of. It's just you and a pad of paper, thinking the whole time.
The article refers to mathematical work, which is by its nature very dense, much more dense than other intellectually-demanding jobs like programming. As a programmer, you might spend half an hour now and then thinking through all the potential race conditions in a parallel algorithm. But you don't do it non-stop all day, day in and day out. Most of your time is spent on things that require far less concentration.
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.
I have happily programmed for long stretches - refactoring, doing project work, mentoring others. Once you've been a developer a while, you can produce magic without very much mental strain.
Break away from that and do something truly difficult - specification meetings where you're designing a process for huge pieces of hardware that haven't yet been built - studying something complicated and unfamiliar to you - etc - and perhaps you'll find - like me - that you've only got a few hours available to you before your brain turns to mush.
It might be correct about the 4 hours. It might also be irrelevant for most people. For most disciplines, accomplishing anything consists of some cognitively very demanding work, and a lot of 'admin'. Some violin players and mathematicians may get by on doing only the hard stuff, but most have to apply for grants, participate in conferences, transcribe/arrange, maintain equipment, etc.
For a startup founder I think this is especially true. A lot of the things you do won't be very cognitively demanding. That doesn't mean you can skip it if you want to get anywhere. It doesn't even mean those 'menial' task create less value in your context than the hardcore 100% concentration parts.
Maybe when you've settled down to a predictable working pattern and managed to configure your environment to cater to all the necessary but trivial tasks (and create enough value in your 4 hours to pay for other people taking care of the rest) you can realize this. I'm not there yet.
It seemed to me that the research cited was likely a bit thin. I couldn't tune a guitar, so I have no idea about violin players. But there have been notable cases of very hard-working creative types--Flaubert and Sand come to mind, and Herbert Simon (Turing Award, Nobelist in economics) claimed that a 60-hour work week was about right for him.
I don't intentionally try to structure when/where/how I think about things, but after 23 years, I've gotten pretty in tune with knowing how things 'feel' inside.
I know if I'm going to have a shitty day or a great day the moment I wake up, the first interaction I have with a person (knowing this may make it more likely to happen, but short of that...).
I know when my brain is running on all cylinders, and when it's choking for more air. Tuning into these signals (I have no idea what they are, only 'feelings'), I can lay out the things I want to do in the next few days, and roll with the punches. It'd be interesting to see the amount of time idlers and time progressors (I'm at my computer most of the day, looking at my google search history would give a good indication - I generally don't google that much when I read articles on HN or Reddit, but when I'm doing something I'm googling up a storm).
No sense fitting a square key into a round hole when tomorrow the round key will be sitting in my hand.
You have to be careful not to give too much weight to something that can have self fulfilling prophecy effects- i.e. "I'm going to have a shitty day" sets you up to have a shitty day. I'm not saying its bad to listen to your internal compass, but you have to make sure that you aren't just giving yourself excuses. In my experience, I found that sometimes I have done exactly that, like I have something difficult to do and all of a sudden "my mind is tired, now isn't a good time."
In my experience this is what happens with programmers in corporate environments and produces excessive hours - 2 hours concentrating in the morning, 2 hours concentrating in the evening, and 8 hours of bullshit in between.
Wow, 2 hours of concentrated work in the morning sounds exceptional to me. With open plan offices -- the norm in Brazil and Japan -- it's damn near impossible to have 20 straight minutes of uninterrupted work: phones ringing, people talking to each other from afar, people interrupting you, etc.
I'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.
I tend to agree, although I think you can concentrate longer for short, unsustainable durations. My standard schedule in law school was a few hours during the semester, then a few weeks of 8-10 hour days around finals.
My take away from the experience was that 8 hours of real work is really a lot of work. And distractions are absolute poison: internet, cell phone, etc. Nothing quite like locking yourself in a room with just a book and highlighter--no computer, no cell phone, no people. You add those things to the mix and it can easily take a 16 hour day to get 8 hours of real work done.
Are there any peer-reviewed studies on this? This looks like purely anecdotal evidence. It makes sense on the surface, but I don't think I can trust that four hours of intense concentration per day is some sort of "cognitive limit" without an actual scientific study.
I don't know about writers and the morning, but there is plenty of evidence that the ideal block of learning or studying is pretty small. For example, you have spaced repetition ( http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition ), where a few short minutes of studying spread out over time is vastly more efficient than a few big blocks of studying with no subsequent review sessions. And I believe there's a bunch of research on lectures becoming a waste of time after around 15-20 minutes (IIRC, FAA-sponsored).
I think another item to add to this is that some days that 4 hour day is going to be your ceiling and anything which creates yet more cognitive exhaustion is going to erode that further. For example, serious stress from having to hit a deadline or being overloaded could bust that 4 hours worth of reserves down to 2 or 3. If you try to force it, you might just end up sitting at your workstation all day idling at brainless tasks such as browsing the internet or half attempting to create some sort of structure out of the mess of the task list your clients have sent you.
It's interesting that we see so many articles posted on hacker news on how to be more productive, beat procrastination and be more motivated when really this article the OP posted explains it all. In most cases you probably don't have a problem with procrastination and motivation, it's simply that you are over-extending yourself. Cut back your commitments and you fix your problem.
I have been freelancing for most of my time as a developer, and I have worked remotely for all of it.
The one actual job I had as a web developer set the work week as 40 hours a week (8 hours a day.) This left me wondering if any developers actually work this long of a day and how they could possibly do it.
When I'm doing client work, I'm ON, all the circuit boards are lit up. I can't keep this going for more than 4 - 6 hours per day. If I work a long day, then the next day I'm drained and I have to pay off that debt.
It actually took me years to really figure this out after a life of being trained to the 40 hour work week (parents, my early work life.) The 40 hour model for work is broken.
If 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?
In 'How to Create a Mind', Kurzweil states that Kasparov could simulate 100k board positions in parallel. Which was roughly same working knowledge as, say, Shakespeare with 100k word senses (http://books.google.com/books?id=FCcXiBPurdEC - search for 'board positions' and read next 3 pages).
Further, he suggests that each of the 100k may require 100 pattern recognizers in neo-cortex. That means, the brain needs to configure 10 million patterns in total - these are either newly observed, or new relations formed with existing patterns.
I'm sure its not linear, but if you divide 10M patterns by 10k hours, that means the neocortex needs to add an average of 1 pattern every 3.6s, or 4k patterns per every 4 hours (ie, limit for day). Thats about 400k neurons / day re-purposed for learning through deliberate practice to learn 40 board positions / day in chess.
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Continuing the conjecture, what we know about about spaced-repetition and mass-repetition might provide some nice bounds for upper limit on how these neurons can be exposed to learning material over 4-hr period to optimize their use as pattern recognizers.
Could make a nice illustrative simulation to speculatively address your question about limits of concentration / learning reservoir.
I think theoretically less-intense tasks use up your concentration more quickly if you do it intermittently with an intense task. Which I think makes the usual "work 30 minutes, Facebook 5 minutes, repeat" cycle quite devastating to productivity.
I think we overestimate how quickly we can really context switch. It's interesting to look at how people respond to stimulants. People take adderall to "help them focus" but what it really does is magnify what I think is a latent resistance to context switching.
That'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.
Do we have any idea what it actually _is_ what is getting depleted when we start to run out of energy or concentration? It's something I've wondered about already a few times - I mean I can pretty much feel running out of steam myself. Which means there is some way in which my mind is able to measure whatever it is that it causing this.
By 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.
...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.
Implications: People are not going to be great at their second job or at night school. It's probably better to quit a tiring job and find a quiet one where you can study something you want to do with your life.
I've have great success with something similar to The Pomodoro Technique. Alternating activities every few segments helps me go a lot longer than I would trying to plow through on one subject.
"Your Brain At Work" points out, among other things, that the brain is capable of doing much less intensive work (as in, concentration) than most people believe it is.
Oh, it can be done. Just not every day. I once went on a hacking run in grad school that was over 24 hours sustained. I was a gibbering mess for the next couple days, but I think it was worth it.
I wouldn't do it for a job, though. I think that can only be done for love.
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 like to know if there's evidence of this for learning, however, even if it is mathematics.
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.)
Even though a lot of smart people agree that we can only get a few hours of real concentration a day, not many of them link to scientific papers that support this claim. I would agree that the claim "feels right". But in absence of a real experiment, how valuable is this insight really? Maybe useful to keep the idea in the back of one's head, but seems far from a definitive answer.
I imagine that any feasible scientific experiment would measure only a crude approximation to reality. How can you randomize someone to a job and a way of working? Most people are not capable of concentrating for four hours a day, or have jobs that don't permit it.
At best you might recruit some undergraduates -- nearly all psychology subjects are college students -- and have them do some artificial task one way or another for a couple weeks. I find anecdotes from successful musicians, scientists, and authors more persuasive than data from an contrived scientific study.
I have worked with some extremely successful and famous artists and musicians, some follow the pattern outlined here, some do not. I know one musician who would work for 36 or 48 hours or more without a break of any kind including sleep, so as to complete an idea without losing the thread. The proof is in the pudding and there are many many recipes.
[+] [-] axiom|13 years ago|reply
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 this either. I'll go further and say that a large number of the people who complain about having to work more than a few hours a day are doing nothing more than rationalizing their lazy HN and/or reddit habits.
[+] [-] jdietrich|13 years ago|reply
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 of software developers routinely do work that is intellectually on a par with mathematical research; The rest are for the most part skilled tradesmen, doing work they understand relatively well.
It is universally accepted that all but the most prodigious musicians do not benefit from more than 4 or 5 hours of practice a day. They can often easily do twelve or sixteen hours a day, but the extra time is simply wasted. Once your reserves of concentration are spent, you're just going through the motions without learning anything. Most conservatories go to great lengths to persuade their students to practice less, because young musicians are often convinced that they can attain mastery through sheer force of effort.
I can sit and transcribe or arrange parts all day long. I can play from sheet music until my hands give out, all the while daydreaming about what I'm having for tea or what chores need doing. I can't usefully improvise or compose for more than about two hours at a time, or more than four hours in a day. I can feel the point at which I start playing familiar riffs rather than truly improvising; When I've run out of ideas and I'm just writing pastiche. There are composers who claim to do regular eight-hour days, but when you look deeper they invariably spend most of that day arranging or transcribing or recording into the computer, stuff that's essentially just admin.
[+] [-] Smudge|13 years ago|reply
I find that I can focus intensely for shorter bursts over a couple hours, but then I hit my limit and need to push the really hard stuff aside for a while. Sure, I can crank through a ton of tedious or menial tasks (and there are certainly plenty of them), but that's really not the same.
When I complain about being expected to sit around for 8, 9, 10 hours a day (and I do occasionally complain), it's not because I'm rationalizing lazy habits or want to get out of work. I love my work.
No -- It's because in only 3-4 of those hours I will finish 90% of what I ultimately get done in a day. The trick is in knowing how to optimize those hours of productivity, and when to go home and give your brain time to decompress.
[+] [-] rwallace|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vidarh|13 years ago|reply
In 17 years of managing many dozen staff, mostly developers admittedly, in a variety of different settings, I've never seen a someone that managed to be productive with mentally strenuous even a full 8 hour day at a time other than very occasionally when they're on a roll. Generally, the ones that do best are those who manage to spread out their work, take proper breaks and intersperse the rest of their mentally demanding work with "menial" tasks, and who goes home and puts their work away completely.
Maybe your're an exception, but if you are, be prepared that people will either disbelieve you or expect you to prove it. More likely, your idea of "sustained 12-16 hour days" only actually involves a few hours of what the rest of us would consider mentally strenuous work a day.
Put in 12-16 hour days for a while with repetitive, simple tasks taking most of the time when working on something that is overall exciting, sure, that works for a while (though eventually that too tends to produce burnout - I've had to order developers home after the strain starter producing negative results with fewer hours than that).
For me, what works best is that whenever I feel that my concentration is slipping, if I don't feel I have time for a proper break, I will switch to mindless tasks, such as updating my todo list (often spending time breaking bigger tasks into tasks that are realistically small enough for windows of a couple of hours), doing my e-mail, or if I'm home I'll do the housework, and I'll try to "switch off" while I do, practicing mindfulness meditation for the truly "mindless" tasks such as cleaning.
Sometimes I get lucky, and my concentration stays on top for longer in one go, and I cherish those moments, but I "pay" afterwards (e.g. crash on the sofa when I get home, or need to slow down the following day).
[+] [-] zasz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattm|13 years ago|reply
> Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline
I think many of us have done this here. What I've noticed from doing this is I start to make lots of mistakes that I wouldn't normally. At a certain point, this turns into a vicious cycle where I think slower and make more mistakes so I need to work more to fix them.
Maybe you're superman and can really work all those extra hours at full concentration...but probably not.
Here's an easy way you can check. Use a timer and throughout the day start the timer when you are going into work that requires full concentration and then stop it when you're done or someone interrupts you or you need to go to the bathroom or you break off from your task. Meetings and emails don't count.
I think you'll be surprised at the results.
[+] [-] jonmc12|13 years ago|reply
There was an academic paper a few years back "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" ( a nice summary here - http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...). The paper breaks down 3 types of activity: work, play and deliberate practice. Work is exercising skills you already know; Play is creativity, fun, exploration; Deliberate practice is building a skill - where expertise is achieved through focused training in a particular skill. The article suggests there is evidence that it takes about 10yrs to acheive expert status in a skill. Malcom Gladwell introduced a similar topic through pop-sci writing "Outliers" - suggesting there was evidence that becoming an expert required 10k hrs of practice.
To me, practice requires the absolute most concentration - unlike 'work', with 'deliberate practice', by definition, you can't supplement skill with experience for efficiency.. to learn you have to evolve skill from more experiences. And I believe thats why the linked articuled a 'cognitive limit' of 4 hours by way of a violinist practicing in spurts of 2x2hrs=4hrs per day.
The last paragraph in the article talks about "four hours of intense concentration per day", and I'm not sure I buy that abstraction because "concentrating" and "training" are 2 different things. The author (and interviewee) is inferring that concentration is the constraint, but I'd suggest its more likely learning/trainability speed constraint.
So, a different interpretation, but I may be agreeing with you own observations. I think deliberate practice shows an upper bound for cognitive limit - but in the sense of new patterns being formed in the brain. I don't think deliberate practice necessarily shows the upper bound for concentration based on the information presented.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
The article refers to mathematical work, which is by its nature very dense, much more dense than other intellectually-demanding jobs like programming. As a programmer, you might spend half an hour now and then thinking through all the potential race conditions in a parallel algorithm. But you don't do it non-stop all day, day in and day out. Most of your time is spent on things that require far less concentration.
[+] [-] 1123581321|13 years ago|reply
I certainly agree it is tempting to read about four hours of concentration and use the article to justify four hours of mediocre work.
[+] [-] peteretep|13 years ago|reply
Break away from that and do something truly difficult - specification meetings where you're designing a process for huge pieces of hardware that haven't yet been built - studying something complicated and unfamiliar to you - etc - and perhaps you'll find - like me - that you've only got a few hours available to you before your brain turns to mush.
[+] [-] hmbg|13 years ago|reply
For a startup founder I think this is especially true. A lot of the things you do won't be very cognitively demanding. That doesn't mean you can skip it if you want to get anywhere. It doesn't even mean those 'menial' task create less value in your context than the hardcore 100% concentration parts.
Maybe when you've settled down to a predictable working pattern and managed to configure your environment to cater to all the necessary but trivial tasks (and create enough value in your 4 hours to pay for other people taking care of the rest) you can realize this. I'm not there yet.
[+] [-] saraid216|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|13 years ago|reply
It seemed to me that the research cited was likely a bit thin. I couldn't tune a guitar, so I have no idea about violin players. But there have been notable cases of very hard-working creative types--Flaubert and Sand come to mind, and Herbert Simon (Turing Award, Nobelist in economics) claimed that a 60-hour work week was about right for him.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mercuryrising|13 years ago|reply
I know if I'm going to have a shitty day or a great day the moment I wake up, the first interaction I have with a person (knowing this may make it more likely to happen, but short of that...).
I know when my brain is running on all cylinders, and when it's choking for more air. Tuning into these signals (I have no idea what they are, only 'feelings'), I can lay out the things I want to do in the next few days, and roll with the punches. It'd be interesting to see the amount of time idlers and time progressors (I'm at my computer most of the day, looking at my google search history would give a good indication - I generally don't google that much when I read articles on HN or Reddit, but when I'm doing something I'm googling up a storm).
No sense fitting a square key into a round hole when tomorrow the round key will be sitting in my hand.
[+] [-] the_cat_kittles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojbyrne|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nandemo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LearnYouALisp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idoh|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
My take away from the experience was that 8 hours of real work is really a lot of work. And distractions are absolute poison: internet, cell phone, etc. Nothing quite like locking yourself in a room with just a book and highlighter--no computer, no cell phone, no people. You add those things to the mix and it can easily take a 16 hour day to get 8 hours of real work done.
[+] [-] rthomas6|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dyno12345|13 years ago|reply
http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/everything/er...
[+] [-] johnfuller|13 years ago|reply
It's interesting that we see so many articles posted on hacker news on how to be more productive, beat procrastination and be more motivated when really this article the OP posted explains it all. In most cases you probably don't have a problem with procrastination and motivation, it's simply that you are over-extending yourself. Cut back your commitments and you fix your problem.
[+] [-] johnfuller|13 years ago|reply
The one actual job I had as a web developer set the work week as 40 hours a week (8 hours a day.) This left me wondering if any developers actually work this long of a day and how they could possibly do it.
When I'm doing client work, I'm ON, all the circuit boards are lit up. I can't keep this going for more than 4 - 6 hours per day. If I work a long day, then the next day I'm drained and I have to pay off that debt.
It actually took me years to really figure this out after a life of being trained to the 40 hour work week (parents, my early work life.) The 40 hour model for work is broken.
[+] [-] stephengillie|13 years ago|reply
---
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?
[+] [-] jonmc12|13 years ago|reply
Further, he suggests that each of the 100k may require 100 pattern recognizers in neo-cortex. That means, the brain needs to configure 10 million patterns in total - these are either newly observed, or new relations formed with existing patterns.
I'm sure its not linear, but if you divide 10M patterns by 10k hours, that means the neocortex needs to add an average of 1 pattern every 3.6s, or 4k patterns per every 4 hours (ie, limit for day). Thats about 400k neurons / day re-purposed for learning through deliberate practice to learn 40 board positions / day in chess.
__________________________
Continuing the conjecture, what we know about about spaced-repetition and mass-repetition might provide some nice bounds for upper limit on how these neurons can be exposed to learning material over 4-hr period to optimize their use as pattern recognizers.
Could make a nice illustrative simulation to speculatively address your question about limits of concentration / learning reservoir.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
I think we overestimate how quickly we can really context switch. It's interesting to look at how people respond to stimulants. People take adderall to "help them focus" but what it really does is magnify what I think is a latent resistance to context switching.
[+] [-] minikomi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flexie|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stephengillie|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coffeeaddicted|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gobitron|13 years ago|reply
I also agree it is possible to do longer bursts, but that is pretty rare in my experience.
[+] [-] drcode|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikAugust|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incision|13 years ago|reply
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
[+] [-] galaktor|13 years ago|reply
"Your Brain At Work" points out, among other things, that the brain is capable of doing much less intensive work (as in, concentration) than most people believe it is.
[+] [-] Dove|13 years ago|reply
I wouldn't do it for a job, though. I think that can only be done for love.
[+] [-] realitygrill|13 years ago|reply
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 like to know if there's evidence of this for learning, however, even if it is mathematics.
[+] [-] hyperbovine|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cerebrum|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvursache|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johndcook|13 years ago|reply
At best you might recruit some undergraduates -- nearly all psychology subjects are college students -- and have them do some artificial task one way or another for a couple weeks. I find anecdotes from successful musicians, scientists, and authors more persuasive than data from an contrived scientific study.
[+] [-] a3voices|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whiddershins|13 years ago|reply