Pardon me if I’m missing it, but I can’t see a lot about your experience of working 4 hours a day. Like how is that for you? Have you tried working 6 or 2?
I tried avoiding including too much of my own experiences to avoid making the post too idiosyncratic, but I’m happy to elaborate on it!
I haven’t had a period of working only 2h consistently, so I don’t know how I would feel about that. However, during busy periods (e.g. if I have both teaching and service obligations) I think my main option to this would be to do nothing and then binge work during vacations, which I have done before and I would expect to be more common.
I have had periods of working 6 hours a day pretty consistently. What distinguished these periods I think was that I was very intrinsically motivated about the research and had minimal other obligations to navigate at the same time, so I naturally ended up just thinking about my work most of the time.
Today when I’m in a position with more regular events during my week, I find this harder. If I schedule 6 hours of work a day (which I did for a large part of last year), I often end up with the feeling that I don’t have enough time to navigate other things. I have done this for a few weeks for particular projects, but find it difficult to have as a default working aim. I personally found 4h/day somewhat of a sweet spot, and have been doing that consistently for the last few weeks.
With that said, I have pretty low confidence that effective 6h/day cannot be achieved by others. My main aim with this post was to illustrate some ways in which a lower number achieves many of the benefits I was aspiring to with working more, and might at least for some have a substantial marginal impact on the costs of work. More generally, my experiences are obviously personal, and not something I would want people to put too much weight on.
Pardon me if I’m missing it, but I can’t see a lot about your experience of working 4 hours a day. Like how is that for you? Have you tried working 6 or 2?
I tried avoiding including too much of my own experiences to avoid making the post too idiosyncratic, but I’m happy to elaborate on it!
I haven’t had a period of working only 2h consistently, so I don’t know how I would feel about that. However, during busy periods (e.g. if I have both teaching and service obligations) I think my main option to this would be to do nothing and then binge work during vacations, which I have done before and I would expect to be more common.
I have had periods of working 6 hours a day pretty consistently. What distinguished these periods I think was that I was very intrinsically motivated about the research and had minimal other obligations to navigate at the same time, so I naturally ended up just thinking about my work most of the time.
Today when I’m in a position with more regular events during my week, I find this harder. If I schedule 6 hours of work a day (which I did for a large part of last year), I often end up with the feeling that I don’t have enough time to navigate other things. I have done this for a few weeks for particular projects, but find it difficult to have as a default working aim. I personally found 4h/day somewhat of a sweet spot, and have been doing that consistently for the last few weeks.
With that said, I have pretty low confidence that effective 6h/day cannot be achieved by others. My main aim with this post was to illustrate some ways in which a lower number achieves many of the benefits I was aspiring to with working more, and might at least for some have a substantial marginal impact on the costs of work. More generally, my experiences are obviously personal, and not something I would want people to put too much weight on.