Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:00]
Oliver Berkman
The three to four hour rule is just a reflection of the fact that like if you look back over the routines and daily rituals of so many different figures in history, artists, authors, scholars, composers, you find again and again and again that the amount of time that they attempt to dedicate each day is very rarely more than about three or four hours.
- [00:22]
Host of Nudge
This rule can be seen repeatedly throughout history. US Presidents, literary greats and world renowned scientists follow it. Yet today on Nudge, my guest explains why this rule works and why it's almost impossible for you or I to follow it. All of that coming up. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioural science, but that is exactly what Sandler Training did with HubSpot. They use breeze, HubSpot's AI powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped by 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help your business grow. Today on Nudge, I'm joined by the author of one of the best selling books on time management and happiness.
- [01:24]
Oliver Berkman
My name is Oliver Berkman. I'm the author of the books 4000 weeks and meditations for Mortals.
- [01:31]
Host of Nudge
In his latest book, Meditation for Mortals, Oliver made an interesting finding.
- [01:36]
Oliver Berkman
If you look back over the routines and daily rituals of so many different figures in history, artists, authors, scholars, composers, just so many people, you find again and again and again that the amount of time that they attempt to dedicate each day to the sort of meat of their work, to kind of deep focused thought or creative production is very rarely more than about three or four hours.
- [02:03]
Host of Nudge
Oliver writes how Charles Darwin, working on the theory of natural selection, concentrated for just two 90 minute periods and then one more one hour period each day. Celebrated author Virginia Woolf wrote for just three and a half hours after a leisurely breakfast and she produced nine novels, 50 short stories, three book length essays and scores of shorter works. Despite ending her own Life Aged just 59, the mathematician Henry Poincare focused intensely from 10 to 12 in the morning and then from five to seven in the evening. And then he called it a day.
- [02:37]
Oliver Berkman
And this specific amount just occurs with so much regularity it's kind of spooky.
- [02:44]
Host of Nudge
Oliver writes that Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson, Alice Monroe and G. Day Ballard all engaged in focus work in a similar stretch of time, as did Anthony Trollope who claimed that he managed to write 250 words every 15 minutes during the three hour stint he put in each morning before heading to his job at the post office. Three hours a day, Trollope observed, will produce as much as a man ought to write.
- [03:09]
Oliver Berkman
And I look at some of the reasons for why that should be. Why it's very helpful to have lots of time in a creative career when you're not focused on the creative task because of what's going on in your unconscious and all the rest of it.
- [03:21]
Host of Nudge
Specifically, Oliver references Alex Pang's research in the book Rest. Pang found that it's more effective to focus intensely during only your peak hours, rather than half heartedly all day. This is because creativity appears to depend partly on the processes taking place in your brain while you're not focusing. Limiting the time allocated to high stakes work also reduces the feeling of being intimidated or oppressed by the work itself, which can cause some people to procrastinate.
- [03:50]
Oliver Berkman
But the sort of takeaway that I draw from that is not that we can all necessarily afford to just do four hours work a day, because a lot of those people had many servants to handle the business of life, but just that in a sort of fairly autonomous professional situation where you get to schedule your day. To some extent, it's a really good idea A to try to ring fence three or four hours in the course of the day if you can, to be free from interruption, and B not to stress too hard about ring fencing any other time.
- [04:22]
Host of Nudge
Oliver quotes Leonard Wolff, who writes that his wife, as if moved by a law of unquestionable nature, went off and worked until lunch at one. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures. If one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days a year. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so much ring fencing. Three to four hours of solid work is deeply important, but most people go about it entirely the wrong way. Later, Oliver will explain why most of us fail to follow this rule. But first we need to cover why the rule is important. This rule is important because our life is finite. We have far less time than we typically expect, and Oliver has anecdotal evidence to prove it. When he asked one of his friends to guess how many weeks the average human lives for, he got a fairly hilarious response.
- [05:18]
Oliver Berkman
No. One of my friends guessed 150,000 weeks, which I always like as an example, because if you double it, you get all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia, we really don't have 150,000 weeks or anything approaching it. I think that just speaks to this sense that the amount of time we have left in our lives is functionally equivalent to sort of forever. Even though of course we all know intellectually that that's ridiculous.
- [05:43]
Host of Nudge
The scholars, authors, conductors and presidents who implemented the three to four hour rule realized that they needed to ring fence time to get things done. Simply hoping it would get done wouldn't work. There aren't enough hours in the day or weeks in our lives to accomplish things without diligent attention.
- [05:59]
Oliver Berkman
I think that what I'm trying to suggest is that we are so finite as against the space of things that we could in principle do or tasks that we could usefully complete demands we could feel, could, could feel imposed upon us. All the rest of it. Things to read, places to go. We're so finite that actually there's something very powerful about just realizing that getting anywhere close to getting your arms around it all, getting on top of everything, is just completely off the table.
- [06:26]
Host of Nudge
Yet some of us attempt the opposite of the three to four hour rule. They attempt to spend every waking hour trying to achieve their goals.
- [06:33]
Oliver Berkman
There's a way of half approaching the topic of the finitude of life that you sometimes see where people think that because life is short, that means they've got to really pack every day with amazing, extraordinary experiences. They've got to sort of put a lot of effort and honestly a kind of anxious stress even into really like sucking the most out of life. I tend to think that comes from not having quite followed this argument all the way to the end, right? Because it's still a kind of an attempt to win in the fight against finitude. And you're never going to do that, right? No matter how much you pack into a life, the number of things you could in principle have done but didn't do is always going to be vastly greater. And I think that is the point, as I say, when you can then let go of this futile quest to do everything and please everybody and fulfill every ambition that you can possibly think of. And then it's much easier to sort of fully pour your time, attention and focus into doing a few things and actually doing them and making an impact with them.
- [07:40]
Host of Nudge
I love Oliver's point, but I wondered, what do I do with my email inbox? There are an endless number of emails that I have coming in. How do I keep on top of them by doing less?
- [07:50]
Oliver Berkman
The idea that if you have an overwhelming incoming supply of anything, that you're going to get on top of it by making yourself more and more efficient and optimized, being able to process more of it in the same amount of time. That's the flaw. What happens very obviously in the case of email is you decide to get much better at answering email. You answer email at a much quicker tempo, so you're replying more quickly to more replies. You're getting, people reply to your replies. You get a reputation for being responsive on email. The end result is more email. As they say, the reward for good time management is more work.
- [08:24]
Host of Nudge
In his book 4000 Hours, Oliver shares the ancient Greek myth where the gods punish King Sisyphus for his arrogance by sentencing him to push an enormous boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down again, an action that he is condemned to repeat for all of eternity. Oliver says that in the contemporary version, Sisyphus would empty his inbox, lean back, take a deep breath before hearing the familiar p. You have new messages.
- [08:49]
Oliver Berkman
I think the general sort of abstract point here is just that if you take any system, including yourself, and all you do is make it more efficient at processing things, then in a world of effectively infinite inputs to that system, all else being equal, all that's going to happen is just that more and more and more inputs enter the system and need dealing with. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with efficiency in the sense that, like the example I've given before, if it takes you an hour and a half to find your clothes in the morning, there's something in your daily routines that could use a bit of improvement. The fallacy is thinking that ever more efficiency is ever going to get you to this place of total control, feeling effortlessly on top of everything, in the driver's seat of life that I think we are often being sort of seduced towards by a certain kind of productivity advice that we never get to never achieve.
- [09:44]
Host of Nudge
The three to four hour rule is very inefficient. Most people can work for around eight hours a day, five days a week, and many can work for far longer. But by limiting our core hours of work, we genuinely might achieve more. Oliver explains why in his book Saying the Rule acknowledges the reality that most of us don't have the capacity for more than a few daily hours of intense concentration. It also respects the limitation in another critical it frees you from the futile perfectionist struggle to try and make the whole day unfold in accordance with your desires. In other words, it respects the fact that your work demands focus, but at the same time it spares you from having to spend most of your hours in a Defensive posture. Oliver writes that you don't have to be braced against each new email, phone call or serendipitous encounter in the hallway because you've made time to focus.
- [10:35]
Oliver Berkman
So much of life is unpredictable. So much benefit comes from serendipitous parts of life. It's such a sort of losing battle to try to impose Your will over 12 hours a day of any sort of normal life. The alternative to that is not just to give up trying to do that at all. The alternative to that is to be sort of quite devoted and dutiful about trying to protect three, maybe four hours and then cut yourself some slack. Cut everyone else some slack too when they interrupt you in all the rest of that time.
- [11:03]
Host of Nudge
Following this rule means doing two things. The first is to try and ring fence a three or four hour period each day which is free from appointments and interruptions. An equally important second part is not to worry about imposing too much order on the rest of the day, to accept that the usual fragmentary chaos of life will probably characterise your other hours.
- [11:24]
Oliver Berkman
And this is what I try to do in my work. You know, if I've managed to spend two or three hours usually first thing in the working day, moving my main current project forward, then it's not only okay that the rest of the day is going to be much more scattered and in some sense unpredictable. It's a good thing because then you get to like have interesting conversations with people and follow lines of thought that you hadn't planned to do. Or above all, you know, the other thing is to like, be able. You can do some things that you feel like doing rather than having to sort of dutifully complete a sort of strict running order for the day so you can harness the energy of like, oh, actually you know what, I'd quite like to deal with that issue right now, so why don't I. So it's that balance between discipline and structure and the opposite that I'm talking about there.
- [12:15]
Host of Nudge
Now, Oliver doesn't share many rules. He doesn't think there are many universal principles that apply to everyone. The three to four hour rule is an exception. And there are two other rules that he follows as well. He'll share both of those after this quick break. Marketing against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. If you want to know what's happening right now in marketing, what's coming ahead and how you can lead the way, this podcast is perfect for you. If you want an episode to get you started, I would suggest you search for my episode on Marketing against the Grain. Just search for Phil Agnew on the Marketing against the Grain feed and you'll hear me talk about the perils of using AI for marketing. So go and listen to Marketing against the Grain wherever you get your podcasts I've tried to implement the three to four hour rule since reading about it in Oliver's book Meditation for Mortals. I get to my desk at 7 each morning and I try and work until 10 or 11 and I always focus on my most important task without any distractions or meetings during those first three hours. It's hard and I regularly get distracted, but I do find it works. I get better work done than if I sporadically squeeze in an hour or two of work before or after a meeting or lunch. But there is one problem I have with the rule. Sometimes I just don't know how to get started. Currently I'm in the process of buying my first home. It's a painful experience with a near endless number of documents to sign and check. Recently I was sent a dozen or so documents by my solicitor to read through, and these documents, they had been sitting in my inbox for a week and I just couldn't face opening them. I didn't know where to start, so I kept putting it off. But then I read some advice in Oliver's book.
- [13:59]
Oliver Berkman
We don't easily recognize how much energy we invest in our lives in avoiding doing things right. If there's projects that you haven't got around to launching, or relationships that you're neglecting, or all sorts of things like it may be because you just don't have time, but it might be because there's some aspect of it that is daunting or intimidating or difficult and you just sort of don't want to go there. And the sort of classic examples that are so counterproductive are like you're worried you don't have enough money in the bank account, so you just don't check your bank balance when you go to the atm. Or you're worried that some pain in your stomach might be something serious, so you just kind of never get around to making a doctor's appointment because it would be terrifying if it was something really serious. So it's often specifically the things that we ought to act upon that we don't act upon. Or you know you've got some great idea for a business you want to start, but precisely because it's such a great idea you want to make sure that you're completely ready before you start, like going off down that avenue and calling in those favours or spending that money or whatever it is.
- [15:01]
Host of Nudge
This was exactly the problem I was facing with those documents I'd received from the solicitor. I was a bit anxious about what would be in those documents, so I didn't open the email and I put it off indefinitely. However, Oliver has a rule in his book that could help. He calls the rule just go to the shed.
- [15:18]
Oliver Berkman
And the idea of just going to the shed, which is phrasing I get from Dutch Zen monk called Paul Lumens, is simply, and it's to do with the example of somebody who's become terrified of clearing out their junk filled shed. The point is that like all you need to do to start moving on this kind of thing you've been avoiding is the tiniest possible move that brings it into your reality or to be more specific, helps you accept that it already is a part of your reality. So if it was clearing out a shed, it could be just going and standing in that shed. If it was, you know, making a particular phone call, as he points out, it could just literally be picturing yourself picking up the phone and making that phone call. I'm usually pretty skeptical of the benefits of visualization, but this is one of the areas where I think it can really help you just literally take yourself through the mental steps that would be involved in just accepting that this was something that you had to contend with. You imagine yourself checking your bank balance, you know, that can be all that you need to sort of unclog the flow of action because when you do that you're sort of no longer, by definition, you're no longer investing mental energy and trying to pretend that it isn't part of your reality.
- [16:37]
Host of Nudge
So that's what I did. Drinking a coffee before I started my day, I mentally pictured what I'd do, which documents I'd look at first, how I'd use Google and a bit of AI to help me understand what on earth they meant and how I'd create a list of questions based on what I found. It sounds so small, so insignificant just to, just to think about something in advance, but it genuinely made a difference. That short bit of time mentally thinking through the task turned it from something that was causing me low level anxiety for a week into something that I felt ready to challenge.
- [17:06]
Oliver Berkman
And it's an interesting distinction as against something you do see in the sort of self help world that what you should do in this kind of Context is just sort of, you know, muscle through and make yourself do these things. That's not what I'm talking about because that just tends to just turn into a inner fight with yourself. I'm talking specifically about just being completely gentle, completely ridiculously, kind of incremental. No one else needs to know that you're picturing these things in your mind. Right? So if you're embarrassed by this, but just, just making the first step that acknowledges the reality of this challenge instead of continuing to put a lot of emotional energy into trying to feel like it, it doesn't exist at all.
- [17:49]
Host of Nudge
In his book, Oliver quotes C.G. jung who said, we cannot change anything unless we accept it. Or in my case, I cannot answer an email from my solicitor unless I spend some time mentally preparing for it. Going to the shed isn't the final rule that Oliver suggests. He has one more for me that I'd never heard of before. He suggests that instead, or in addition to your to do list, you should also keep a done list.
- [18:13]
Oliver Berkman
I think a done list, which as it sounds is just a list of the activities that you complete during the day as you complete them. I think the most important reason for that is that just we are completely conditioned to compare what we've done in the day to the sort of infinite number of things that we could usefully have done that day. You always end up sort of comparing your output to an impossible infinite quantity. And guess what? You always end up thinking pretty negatively about how much you've got through.
- [18:47]
Host of Nudge
There's a Mary Curie quote in Oliver's book that summarises this nicely. She wrote, one never notices what has been done. One can only see what remains to be done. The done list helps combat that.
- [19:00]
Oliver Berkman
So I think a done list, there are other ways of doing this. People familiar with like Kanban methods of work organization can. It's another way of sort of visualizing what has been completed. It's satisfying, it's good for your self esteem. But more than that, it's actually a kind of a. There's something about it that gives you more sort of purchase on your work life. It's, it's to do with sort of making somewhat wiser choices I think perhaps about what you do because you're thinking to yourself, okay, I'm only going to move a few items from the infinite world of could be done through to the list of has been done today. What is genuinely worth my, my time and focus in that respect. What would be deeply satisfying to see on that, on that list. And I just find it to be a really sort of a really great addition to my working day. Because yeah, you go home at the end of the day or whatever and you can see. You can see that you did not do almost nothing.
- [19:56]
Host of Nudge
A done list helps you recognize and remember your great work. The acknowledgement of progression can give you the motivation to do more. Just going to the shed can help you tackle the anxiety inducing tasks with relative ease. But the rule I want you to take away is the three to four hour rule. Focusing for just three to four hours a day on major important tasks with as little distraction as possible is a great way to genuinely get big projects done without feeling burnt out. And if you feel like three to four hours isn't enough, consider this quote from a New Mexico monk who starts his day at 9:40am and finishes three hours later at 12:40pm he was asked, what do you do if you get to 12:40pm and you still feel like you've got lots of work to do? The monk replied saying, you get over it. Massive. Thank you to Oliver Berkman for coming back on Nudge. This is his second appearance on the show and if you haven't heard his first episode then do go back and check it out. On that episode he persuaded me to stare at a Picasso painting for three hours to learn about patience. I did. It was incredibly tedious and brain numbing, but still fairly enlightening. If you liked either of Oliver's episodes then you were in luck because he and I recorded a third bonus episode. For the bonus show, Oliver shares how social media keeps him hooked, how he weaves weaned himself off social media platforms. He explains that we shouldn't live inside the news cycle and he advocates for people to spend less time worrying about global news and policies that they can't control. He gave me some great advice on how I can help with social issues I care about as well. I think based off today's show, but also the last one, I really can listen to Oliver talk for hours on end. His points are fantastic. So if you have also enjoyed today's show, I think you'll love the bonus episode as well. To get access to that bonus episode, just click the link in the show notes, enter your email and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode. If you are already a Nudge newsletter subscriber, then just check the email I sent you announcing this episode and you'll have a link to the bonus episode in there. In the show notes you'll also find a link to Oliver's book meditation for mortals. It's superbly written and thoroughly thought provoking. I would really recommend you read it. And finally, thank you so much for listening. I wish these episodes took me just three to four hours to produce. They don't. They take much longer. But it is all worthwhile because of the wonderful support I receive from you. The show is nearing 10005 star reviews across Apple and Spotify. That means an awful lot. Thank you so much for your support. I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Bye.