Simplify your time management with the ‘Rule of 4’
Parent Post
Oliver Burkeman
You almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.
Don’t try to extend
Don’t try to extend your core working time. And don’t try to stretch it over eight (or more) distracted hours; that won’t work either.
Focusing on your four core hours should help you get more done with less aggravation.
It should also help you stop beating yourself up when your brain just won’t produce any meaningful insights at 4 p.m. even though there are dozens more items on your to-do list.
Laying down your intellectual
Laying down your intellectual labors and puttering through whatever more mindless work you can manage isn’t a failure.
It’s a wise recognition of the basic need for rest and recuperation built into our brains.
Working with those limits isn’t lazy; it’s the basis of sensible time management.
From Charles Darwin to
From Charles Darwin to Ingmar Bergman, many distinguished thinkers put in around this many hours of work a day.
There is also a huge range of evidence from science, the biographies of geniuses, and even anthropology that pretty much proves our brains only have around four hours a day of work in them.
Protect your core fourYou’re
Protect your core four
You’re going to get the vast majority of your important work done in the four most productive hours of your day no matter what you do.
That’s just how human brains work.
Even Jeff Bezos only expects to manage three high-quality decisions each day.
So build your time management decisions around this “Rule of 4.”