Against long work times

On the value of frequent short exposures to a project

So many times I’ve heard someone say that they need a large chunk of time to get real work done on a project. And much mainstream productivity advice is directed toward freeing up large chunks of time to work intensely—by cancelling meetings, by silencing notifications, by ignoring emails. The reality for many of us, of course, is that we don’t have large chunks of time to work, despite our best efforts—or at least such chunks of time are rare. We have work meetings that can’t be cancelled, medical appointments to go to, a car to get fixed, events to attend at our child’s school, and so on. We find that our days are continually fragmented and disrupted. We don’t have regular three- or four-hour blocks of time in our calendar that we can devote to our most demanding work projects.

Thus, when we insist that we need large chunks of time to work productively, we inevitably set ourselves up for failure because such large chunks of time don’t reliably exist.

I’d like to propose that you try the opposite approach: frequent, short bursts of time on a project. That is, rather than setting aside the entire morning once a week to work on your most intensive project, set aside thirty minutes every day for it.

This advice stems from my observation of my own work habits. I find that I am most creatively and productively engaged with a project in the first thirty minutes or so of working on it, and my efforts wane after that. By the two hour mark, I am wearing out and starting to lose focus. (This is why I have a rule of working on a single project for no more than two hours per day.) The first thirty minutes, then, are my most high-value work times.

Frequent short exposures to a project mean that you’ll encounter the project in multiple states of mind—and perhaps working from multiple different settings. We can intuit the value of encountering a project in different states of mind—you may be attentive to details one day and in one state of mind and more drawn to big-picture thinking and dreaming on a different day. We know from research that we learn better when we encounter the same material in a variety of different environments. Something similar, we might surmise, could be true of work: working in different environments on a project gives us fresh approaches to it.

The key to making good use of frequent, short exposures to a project is the ability to focus efficiently. (In fact, I suspect that many people who think they need large chunks of time to work actually just struggle immensely with effectively getting started.) How to focus efficiently? This is a weighty question. It takes practice and self-discipline, but here is my essential advice for focusing: know exactly, concretely what you want to do next. Do you need to rewrite a paragraph? Do you need to call a client? Do you need to rethink some wording? We get mired in distraction when we don’t have a specific task to direct our energies toward. Remember: distraction and lack of focus are failures of attention. To remedy them, we need specific, engaging tasks to pay attention to.

Thus, to ensure that you focus right away when you sit down to work on a project, either decide in advance exactly what you’re going to do next or make that decision the focus of your attention. In other words, don’t just sit down with vague notions of making progress, but sit down to come up with a plan for what comes next. This should be something very specific and concrete; not “write the next section,” but “clarify this term in this sentence.” In fact, I envision tasks so specific and concrete that you probably can’t think ahead enough to write out an entire to-do list of them, but you can come up with them one at a time as you go.

Another value of frequent short exposures to a project over infrequent long exposures to a project is that it keeps the project fresh in your head. Getting started will be less friction-filled because you’ll remember where you left off. By frequently working on a project, you can also make a regular habit out of it—e.g., working on the project for thirty minutes right after lunch every day—which means that you’re more likely to actually do it.

I think we often complain about days that are broken up by meetings and appointments, care for a sick child, and the like. But what if instead of envisioning clear schedules as ideally conducive to productivity (as much mainstream productivity advice would have us do), we recognized that productivity can happen—successfully—on days with various other obligations breaking up our time? As long as we can focus our attention, we can make progress in even a short amount of time. This is, for many of us, the only way to succeed in our modern world with our busy lives and caretaking responsibilities.