Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

by Michael Easter

Four hours of focused work a day seems to be the sweet spot for productivity. Our greatest thinkers throughout history like Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Ingmar Bergman, and G. H. Hardy swear by four hours. “Four hours creative work a day is about the limit,” said Hardy, one of history’s greatest mathematicians. Science has proved Benedict and Hardy and all those others right. In the 1950s, a group of scientists surveyed a range of the country’s researchers about their work habits. They found, quite paradoxically, that more work didn’t lead to more productivity. The researchers who worked hard twenty hours a week pumped out the most scientific articles. They released double the number of studies than did their counterparts who spent thirty-five hours a week in the lab. But those thirty-five-hour researchers were far better off than the ones who spent sixty hours in the lab. The latter group produced the fewest articles. Follow-up research suggests that working four hours daily allows us to find the sweet spot between hard work and adequate rest. We can work intensely for four hours and get a lot of good work done. Less than that and we leave performance on the table. More than that and we become likely to overdo it. To get injured by physical work, to get burned out by mental work. And this cuts into our future workdays. The nice part is, we can sustain four hours of daily work seven days a week. And despite that whole rule about Sunday being a rest day, many monks work...