The World’s Geniuses Work Only 4 Hours A Day, And Why You Should Too

It’s pretty standard to work eight hours a day, but is this really ideal? The answer depends on what work you do. According to science, working eight hours a day is fine if you’re doing mindless tasks, like working in an assembly line, for example. But if you’re using your brain a lot for your job, or doing something called “knowledge work,” eight hours is definitely too much.

Journalist Oliver Burkeman wrote about the four-hour workday. He made quite a convincing case of why we should only work four hours a day if we’re using our brain a lot for our tasks. See, science and history also support this idea.

Research shows that going beyond four hours of intellectual work a day maxes out the brain.

Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson’s study of violinists (also the basis for the much-debated “10,000-hour rule”) supports the same finding. Science shows that while experts and top performers accumulate thousands of hours of practice, they do so in chunks of four hours or less.

Geniuses throughout history also worked the same way.

Apparently, many geniuses and experts in different fields subscribe to the four-hour workday. Charles Darwin, for example, reportedly only worked for two 90-minute periods in the morning, then an hour later on. Another one is mathematician Henri Poincar, who worked from 10 a.m. to noon and from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Even hunters and gatherers are also believed to have worked only a few hours a day.

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins suggested that people in hunter-gatherer societies didn’t work day and night to survive. He calculated the hours hunter-gatherers worked per day to keep everyone fed, and the numbers suggested it was about three to five hours only.

This doesn’t suggest, however, that you remain idle for the remaining hours. You can still do minor tasks that don’t require so much brain power.

So what do you think of the four-hour workday? Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!