The 4-Hour Workday

In 2007, Tim Ferris published The 4-Hour Workweek, a seminal book on designing a life around entrepreneurial, remote, autonomous work as an antidote to Silicon Valley-inspired hustle culture and its resulting burnout. Though aspirational, it was idealistic and impractical for most people, especially those who already had families and mortgages. Much more realistic, at any stage of life, is the 4-hour workday inspired by author Oliver Burkeman.?

Burkeman posits that perhaps the only hard-and-fast rule of time management that applies to everyone is this: “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.” This means three to four hours total, not just consecutively; in other words, a four-hour stretch in the morning and another in the afternoon or evening is not sustainable. Burkeman makes his claim in a blog post, in which he draws numerous examples of the “famously creative” from the book Rest, by Alex Pang. I can corroborate Burkeman’s argument by pointing to many other famous creatives from Mason Currey’s book, Daily Rituals.

Neither Burkeman nor I suggest literally bailing out of the office or going offline at noon. There are different modes of work: Independent focused, immersive, cognitively-demanding deep work; communication and collaboration (which is about work, not necessarily doing work); and shallower tasks of a more managerial or administrative nature. Burkeman’s main take-away is that to do things that matter and move the needle in your role, you must block three to four hours each day for sustained, focused concentration – ?deep work – and protect that time from the constant distractions and context-switching of email and instant messaging.

Professionals that realize the value of deep work, and structure their days around it, are surprisingly rare in my experience. But among those who do, some go to the opposite extreme and become fanatical about maximizing deep work time, to the point of trying to keep entire days free of emails and meetings. This is not only unrealistic in a modern knowledge-work environment, but also unproductive. Even with a full day at your disposal, diminishing returns will result after more than three or four hours of sustained, cognitively-demanding work. The upshot of the 4-hour workday philosophy is the comfort it offers deep work devotees; as Burkeman writes, “Just focus on protecting four hours – and don’t worry if the rest of the day is characterized by the usual scattered chaos” of emails, meetings, and less intellectually stimulating administrative tasks

Another important lesson of the 4-hour workday is to be realistic about how much is achievable in any particular stretch of days on the calendar. Once you realize that each day offers at most four hours of deep work (to the extent you can even protect the time), you can be more practical about what is achievable in the week ahead, and more reasonable in how you assess progress made in the previous week.

The 4-hour workday philosophy demands responsibility while offering liberation: Responsibility to protect four hours each day for deep work, and to use that time intentionally and productively to make progress on challenging projects that add the most value. Liberation from realizing that four hours per day is all you need, and all you can realistically use, on cognitively demanding work. So don’t over-estimate your rate of progress when planning ahead and committing to milestones. Show yourself and your teams some grace when evaluating headway in hindsight. And be content spending at least half of the business day on communication, collaboration and less-stimulating tasks.

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