Working longer won't increase your output

This is a nice article but it's disabled copy and paste, which irks me enormously. Fortunately this can be circumvented by disabling Javascript.

Our mental bandwidth is embarrassingly small and, rather than pushing its limit, we’d be far more efficient if we leveraged it in a period or series of periods as small as possible.

Charles Darwin, one of the most influential scientists ever to grace this planet, whiled away most of his time walking and ruminating, but also managed to write 19 books, including the revolutionary but highly controversial Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Darwin didn’t toil for 16 hours each day; he achieved these glorious feats by working, as you might have guessed, only 4 hours every day. He worked for two 90-minute periods in the morning and then an additional hour later in the day.

The prolific mathematician Henri Poincare wrote 30 books and 500 papers that covered a range of diverse subjects from theoretical physics to philosophy, and he, like Darwin, also worked every day for no more than 4 hours. Thomas Jefferson also worked only 4 hours each day.

And wait, there’s more. The pioneer of capitalism, Adam Smith, wrote: “The man who works so moderately as to be able to work constantly not only preserves his health the largest but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work.” Bear in mind that capitalism is the very principle upon which our economy is based. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average American works 34.5 hours every week. Either we have misconstrued Smith’s ideas, which is an innocent, reversible mistake, or the increasingly popular notion that the 90-hour work week is aspirational is a lie proliferated to exploit labour.

This is the working principle of the 4-hour workday – tremendous, uncompromising focus during only these peak times. Furthermore, as the psychologist would suggest, rather than resisting enticing distractions, switch off the phone or your data to deny the phone the opportunity to distract you in the first place.

Beyond the 90-minute mark, productivity has been observed to plummet. Coffee and other stimulants, upon which 50 to 90-hour work weeks are helplessly dependent, make it worse. The achievers listed above did not just value focus, but also rest.

There being a high scatter in individual traits, there are people who are able to maintain focus for much longer. That's fine in an employer so long as they recognise this is unusual.

Personally, the way I work depends strongly on what I'm doing. Repetitive tasks I can maintain for very long periods. Thoughtful stuff is done in short, intense bursts, unless inspiration is flowing in which case it can be sustained for a very long time indeed - much longer than for repetitive tasks. The normal situation is something in between, where I flick back and forth between work and reading about unrelated but largely cerebral ideas. I like to try and think about different things and let the focus periods happen naturally, though it is useful to compartmentalise office time for mostly work time and home time for mostly not-work time.

Via Ralph H.

Originally shared by Science ABC

The 4-Hour #Workday: Why You Should Only Work 4 #Hours Instead of 8 : http://sciabc.us/3mA7M #science
http://sciabc.us/3mA7M