Here's a good writeup from a couple of weeks ago but Julian Simpson on time management. This is one of those things I'm always interested to hear other people's processes/thinking on, even when it's very different from my own.
The post references the '4 hour rule/not-rule'. I can't remember where I first came across this, but I think about it a lot. The idea is that most people only really get an average of about four hours high-quality focused work in a day. The exact figure varies up and down, and it's not necessarily about four contiguous hours.
It's also one of those things that may be faintly apocryphal, in that 'fits rather too neatly in a Malcolm Gladwell book' sort of way. But the underlying point feels truthy to me, which is that there is nothing scientific about the eight-hour workday, and you (I) can get a lot more mileage from a shorter number of intense, highly focused hours than a larger number of less-focused ones.
Key to that is 'intense, highly focused'. It's not a case of just putting fewer hours into something. It's a case of using those hours ferociously and not trying to treat all available hours as having equal valence.
In practice, this doesn't work out to me working four hours a day and then stopping. There are several reasons for that:
- I worked a salaried job with contracted hours
- My personal tolerance for this is generally, in fact, higher than four hours
- The 'rule' isn't meant to describe four hours of contiguous time -- it's four hours over the course of a day.
- When I've done it in the past, I've found maintaining that level of output for five days a week more exhausting than treating time in a fluffier, less structured way. (And also get about twice as much done.)
What is generalisable from this, though, and what I use with abandon, is not treating working time as some fluffy, amorphous mass where every available hour is equivalent to every other hour. The headlines of this for me are:
- Time-boxing. Usually 90- or 60-minute windows where I shut off all distractions and just disappear into some large piece of work.
- Intercut these with 'unclenching' time where the goal is only smaller tasks, or occasionally wandering down to the kitchen to eat a little piece of cheese. (The point is not laziness or procrastination, it's to do as little as necessary to make the next focus-box maximally effective rather than half-assing both and calling it productivity.)
- Consider the structure of the week. Right now, Wednesdays are usually meetings/sundries days, which is ideal, because the same level of focused intensity isn't possible, and it breaks up the week nicely. Other times, I know I just don't have the same level of focus in me, and don't try to force (and so structure my time differently to get the value out of it that I can).
Which is to say: being intentional with your time and how you work and mostly not kidding yourself too much about what you can and can't do are perennially useful.