When starting my PhD, my aim was to wake start working at 8 in the morning till 12 midnight. My goal was to sleep for only 6 hours. Sadly this didn’t work and all the initial motivation vanished due to this extreme schedule. Shortly after i completely crashed and didn’t feel like working anymore. I started hating my PhD.

Stress is extremely dangerous. Reading you blog and a few other books like the 4 hour week and some of naseem taleb’s aphorisms i realized what was wrong. Although i was pretending to work from 8 to 12, but i wasn’t being effective. Most of the time i would stare blankly at my computer screen which definitely wasn’t work.

Working in short intense bursts is definitely very effective, manageable and keeps you sane. I have now started working in intense 1 hour (or 2 hour) bursts with zero distraction (no internet or phone). I make sure that every second of that time is spent on doing some work. I stop working as soon as i start to blank out and unable to focus. Carol Dweck in her book “motivation and self-regulation across the lifespan” describes how to reach a state of flow. After my brain reaches the breaking point for intense work i close everything and do some random stuff that i feel like doing at the time. Mostly i roam around, or browse books in the library which have nothing to do with my work. It helps you to think over and plan your next burst of productivity.

4 hours of intense work for me spread through out the day is enough for me. I am now accomplishing more work than i used to with my 8-12 schedule. I love cooking and reading fiction. This gives me ample time to pursue these two passions. Looking back, one of the reasons for hating my work was that i didn’t have the time to pursue these interest. Wasting time is fun, hence we should do away with all the guilt. Even talking to my family members of telephone seemed like wasting time a few years back. Learn to live a more natural life style.

But it sounds like a pipe dream for junior faculty/graduate students, who are under much greater pressure to produce *quickly.*

Maybe it depends on the field. In theoretical computer science, for example, publishing 3 or 4 good papers a year — which would qualify you as a very productive student — doesn’t come close to eating up all of your time. Each paper, from my experience, is months of random thinking and conversations and shower eureka moments followed, at some point, by a week or so of frenzied writing. Add it up and there’s like one month worth of writing and the rest of time just random thinking. Somehow, I end up a lot more busy then this…but I’m not quite sure why?

[...] For more on this topic, and for complete validation if like me, some days you only feel capable of renewing library books and using different color ink to “organize” your calendar, see this post from Study Hacks. [...]

That said, of course you should listen to your body (/brain) and not push yourself too hard; in my experience, that’s when I hit burnout and lose weeks at a time, rather than the few hours I would have lost if I had known when to quit.

It’s no accident that the term “burnout” has its roots in burning out an engine, and I think the analogy holds: you can only keep things in the red for so long before your body quits completely.

The great mathematician Henri Poincare worked 4 hours a day.
10 -2 and 5 -7 I believe. And, in the late evening he read some articles

Great example. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I also agree with that diminishing returns bit. It’s a big challenge for math-type grad students like me to figure out when staring at a proof longer is a waste…

Likewise, I think people should look for “high quality” relaxation time.

This makes sense to me. A lot of people do pseudo-relaxing because — surfing on the computer where they do real work — because it somehow seems better than real relaxing — cracking a beer and a new book.

I’d be curious to know how people go about answering this question. For example, do you look at people who are where you want to be and ask them how much time they spend doing stuff and then take the median of the number of hours they’ve told you?

This is a really good question. My thought: find out what you need to accomplish to be really good at what you do. Then figure out the number of hours those accomplishments really require. The key is being specific. Though I am going to think about this some more…

Again, as long as you are on target to achieving your goal withing whatever timeframe you set out, the amount of time you have to ‘waste’ could actually be considered a measure of your efficiency

I agree. I think, as mentioned above, that identifying what you need to do to be good is the key. This has nothing to do with time. So long as you accomplish this, then you’re golden to spend the rest of your hours doing whatever.

Likewise, I think people should look for “high quality” relaxation time. If for you that means reading blogs, great. But if you just surf the web because you think you’re going to get right back to work, that’s not high quality relaxation. You would be better served just shutting off the internet and picking up your book.