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?

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.

Very interesting post.

first ask yourself how many hours of work do you need to spend to be good at what you do?

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? How do you account for lying? You know some people wear “working long-hours” as a badge of honor–and some people that may only work 4 hours/day may be scared to tell you that for fear of appearing to be a slacker.

Using time as a productivity metric keeps us in an Industrial Age mindset. And to be frank, in my experience, this mindset usually produces inferior results.