According to two older articles from Inc Magazine and The Guardian, the amount of creative work hours that knowledge workers are able to handle each day is 4.
Yes, four total hours of deep work.
They looked at science and examples from historical thought leaders to reach this conclusion.
So, if we spend 4 hours on the actual work, what do we do with the rest of the workday?
The articles suggest that we should focus on education, email, and administrative work.
My Perspective
I agree that after 4 hours of deep work, the rest of the day is best spent on other activities.
However, I don’t think our challenges come from filling “the other” 4 hours.
I believe most knowledge workers would be lucky if they squeezed in 1-2 hours of deep work.
Between meetings, email, and other administrative work, time runs out before deep work starts.
Companies might want to dig in and figure out how to increase the work to 4 hours.
At that level, I can imagine that businesses will achieve great things.
The transition to 4 hours of work will be challenging.
New routines and patterns at both the corporate and employee level will need to be introduced.
I think this is why we see startups outpace established companies.
The administrative creep and culture haven’t seeped into the system.
Team members are working 4 hours a day.
Projects move at a very fast pace.
Your Turn
Do you get 4 hours of deep work each day?
What takes time away from those 4 hours?
How could you start to increase the number day by day?