WHY LONG HOURS DO NOT MEAN BETTER WORK
Our Productivity
Declines Sharply After A Few Hours Of Sustained Effort
Author Anthony Trollope pub lished 47 novels, writing 1,000
words an hour between 5am and 8am every day . “All those I think who have lived
as literary men will agree with me that three hours men will agree with me that
three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write,“ he wrote.
Charles Dickens worked in his study for only five hours a day--from 9am until
2pm, with a break for lunch.
Not just writers, even great mathematicians and scientists
didn't slog. French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who wrote 30 books and 500
papers, “did his hardest thinking between 10am and noon, and again between 5 and
7 in the afternoon,“ says an article in Nautilus.“
Charles Darwin managed to produce 19 books in the same
`leisurely' way. To people steeped in the worship of the 80-hour work week,
this might seem like a contradiction “or a balance that's beyond the reach of
most of us“ but the article says the productivity of these eminent people was
not despite their leisure but because of it.
That has lessons for those of us who seek glory in burnout. A
survey of scientists at Illinois Institute of Technology in the early 1950s
graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of
articles they produced. It showed that productivity increased at first and
peaked when the scientists worked for about 20 hours per week. It dropped
thereafter and researchers working 25 hours a week were no more productive than
those working five hours. “The 60-plus-hour-a-week researchers were the least
productive of all.“
This does not discount the importance of practice or hard work,
but cautions: “Practise too much, and you increase the odds of being struck
down by injury , draining yourself mentally, or burning out.“ The smart thing
is to “limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a
daily or weekly basis.“
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Outliers spread the
idea that 10,000 hours of practice can make you an expert in any field, but the
Nautilus article points out Gladwell glossed over the importance of rest. “The
top performers actually slept about an hour a day more than the average
performers.“
Rest has been reduced to a blind spot these days as everyone has
a tendency to “focus on focused work... This is how we've come to believe that
world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that's wrong.
It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate
rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.“
For more: Nautilus
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