The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

I changed the way I thought about productive time. In the past, I’d believed that I couldn’t sit down and write productively unless I had at least three or four hours with no interruptions. Often, that was hard to arrange, and I felt inefficient and frustrated. To test that assumption, for a few weeks, I added a note on my Resolutions Chart to remind myself of what I’d worked on each day. It didn’t take me long to see that I did better when I had less time. Not several hours but ninety minutes turned out to be the optimally efficient length of time—long enough for me to get some real work done but not so long that I started to goof off or lose concentration. As a consequence, I began to organize my day into ninety-minute writing blocks, separated by different non-writing tasks: exercising, meeting someone, making a phone call, tinkering with my blog. Also,