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“Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”
Cal Newport
This is my fourth try at the method from Gary Keller’s book The ONE Thing.
Each of the first three attempts started with early wins. Then I stopped.
The method starts with a question:
What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
The version I kept hearing was simple: answer the question, then do that one thing.
I read “do” as “finish.”
The Ivy Lee method says the same thing: work on your top task until it’s done.
I tried that too.
When I took Keller’s question literally, the one thing I picked was often big. I scored each day done or not done. By bedtime it wasn’t done. I got discouraged.
So I made the one thing smaller, then smaller again. Once it fit in a few minutes, I checked it off and stopped.
The check marks piled up. The work I cared about barely moved.
So I stopped using the ONE thing method.
A few weeks ago I heard Keller in an interview. He blocks four hours a day for his one thing.
I’d been doing one thing method incorrectly.
The score is yes or no: did you put in the time you said you would?
When I finish the one thing early, now I ask the question again and keep going until the time is up.
In a 1949 letter, the crime novelist Raymond Chandler laid out his rule for a working writer: set aside at least four hours a day.
In those hours, writing was optional. He could look out the window or writhe on the floor. The one rule was to do nothing else. “Either write or nothing,” he wrote.
- Alex Hormozi protects four hours of uninterrupted work.
- Cal Newport wrote his first book in 60 to 90 minutes a day.
- Haruki Murakami writes for five to six hours, starting at 4 a.m.
- Charles Darwin worked in three 90-minute blocks a day.
Two hours can outweigh a day of interruptions.
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What could you build with two focused hours a day?
