Why you should work 4 hours a day, according to science

Darwin, Dickens, and some of the most accomplished people in history have one thing in common. They worked with intense focus — but for only four hours a day.

Charles Darwin.
(Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

When you examine the lives of history's most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organized their lives around their work, but not their days.

Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking.

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