The three to four hour rule is just a reflection of the fact that, if you look back over the routines and daily rituals of so many different figures in history — artists, authors, scholars, composers — you find again and again that the amount of time they attempt to dedicate each day is very rarely more than about three or four hours.
This rule pops up throughout history. US presidents, literary greats, and world-renowned scientists follow it. And this specific amount occurs with so much regularity, it's kind of spooky. Oliver writes that Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson, Aldous Huxley, and J.G. Ballard all worked for three to four hours, as did Anthony Trollope, who claimed that he managed to write 250 words every 15 minutes during the three-hour stint he put in each morning before heading out to his job at the post office. Today I'm chatting with Oliver Burkeman, author of one of the best-selling books on time management and happiness.
My name is Oliver Burkeman. I'm the author of the books Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals.
Oliver writes how Charles Darwin, while working on the theory of natural selection, concentrated for just two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period each day. Celebrated author Virginia Woolf wrote for just three and a half hours after a leisurely breakfast, producing nine novels, around 50 short stories, three book-length essays, and scores of shorter works, despite ending her own life aged 59. The mathematician Henri Poincaré focused intensely from 10 to 12 in the morning and then from 5 to 7 in the evening, and then called it a day.
And I look at some of the reasons for why that should be — why it's very helpful to have lots of time in a creative career when you're not focused on the creative task, because of what's going on in your unconscious and all the rest of it.
Specifically, Oliver references Alex Soojung-Pang's research in his book, Rest. Pang found that it's more effective to focus intensely during only your peak hours rather than half-heartedly all day. This is because creativity appears to depend partly on processes taking place in your brain while you're not focusing.
But the sort of takeaway that I draw from that is not that we can all necessarily afford to just do four hours' work a day, because a lot of those people had many servants to handle the business of life, but just that, if you're in a fairly autonomous professional situation where you get to schedule your day to some extent, it's a really good idea, a) to try to ring-fence three or four hours in the course of the day if you can, to be free from interruption, and b) not to stress too hard about ring-fencing any other time.
Oliver quotes Leonard Woolf, who wrote that his wife, as if moved by a law of unquestionable nature, went off and worked until lunch at one. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year — whether buns or books or pots or pictures — if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days a year. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much. This rule is important because our life is finite. We have far less time than we typically expect. And Oliver has anecdotal evidence to prove it. When he asked his friends to guess how many weeks the average human life lasts, they said this.
One of my friends guessed 150,000 weeks, which I always like as an example, because if you double it, you get all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. We really don't have 150,000 weeks or anything approaching it. I think that just speaks to this sense that the amount of time we have left in our lives is functionally equivalent to sort of forever, even though, of course, we all know intellectually that that's ridiculous.
The scholars, authors, conductors, and presidents who implemented the rule realized that they needed to ring-fence time to get things done.
I think that what I'm trying to suggest is that we are so finite against the space of things that we could in principle do, or tasks that we could usefully complete, demands that could feel imposed upon us, all the rest of it, things to read, places to go. We're so finite that actually there's something very powerful about just realizing that getting anywhere close to getting your arms around it all, getting on top of everything, is just completely off the table.
