Hey there,
It is Matthew Larsen, back with my daily newsletter.
In today’s email, we will talk about why I think four hours of focused work per day is the right standard for an extremely ambitious person.
There is nothing scientifically magical about four hours. It is simply the number I arrived at after doing this for years and introducing it to employees, business partners, and clients.
I have tried everything from one hour per day to 16.
Four hours sits at the intersection of two things. It is enough focused work to completely change the trajectory of your life, while still being realistic enough to complete every day.
When I say focused work, I mean focused, uninterrupted work on something important that moves you closer to your long-term goals. It should support one of your most important goals or a genuinely important business objective.
It should also produce a specific deliverable, a completed task, or meaningful progress that you can clearly identify.
Ordinary email, messages, meetings, administration, scrolling, and reactive busywork do not count. Those things may still need to be done, but they should happen after your four focused hours whenever possible.
One or two hours of focused work is obviously better than nothing, especially when you are first beginning. However, I do not think that is a high enough permanent standard for an extremely ambitious person who wants to make exceptional progress.
On the other extreme, six, eight, or twelve hours of legitimate focused work will consume the majority of your waking life. That is not realistic for most people to maintain forever.
Four hours is different.
Four hours per day becomes 28 hours per week, approximately 120 hours per month, and approximately 1,460 hours per year.
Imagine directing more than 1,000 hours of legitimate, focused work toward your most important goals every year.
That is enough to produce an extraordinary amount of progress.
Four hours is also realistic even if you are a parent, a spouse, running an already chaotic business, working a demanding job, traveling regularly, managing employees, taking care of other people, maintaining a social life, or dealing with an unpredictable schedule.
There are 24 hours in a day. If you sleep for eight hours, you still have 16 waking hours.
Four hours represents only 25% of that time.
Even if it takes you five total hours to complete four focused hours, you still have another 11 hours for your spouse, children, calls, meetings, exercise, ordinary responsibilities, and everything else happening inside your life or business.
These are also not necessarily four additional hours being added to your day.
Most business owners already spend substantially more than four hours working. The problem is that those hours are usually fragmented across messages, calls, email, distractions, random problems, and tasks that do not matter.
The goal is to take four of the hours you are already awake and direct them toward focused work that actually moves your life forward.
Having a family, children, a demanding job, or a chaotic business does not mean the time does not exist. It means that if you do not deliberately protect the time, everyone and everything else will take it from you.
The second part of the standard is to complete the four hours as quickly as possible.
If you wake up at 6:00 a.m., you should aim to have all four hours completed between approximately 11:00 a.m. and noon.
Not 4:00 p.m.
This is not designed to make your life more difficult or turn you into a stressed-out maniac. It is designed to protect the rest of your life.
If you allow four hours of focused work to spread across ten hours, it will interfere with your business, exercise, spouse, children, friends, and everything else you need or want to do.
When you complete the work efficiently, you can spend the rest of the day handling meetings, messages, administrative work, family responsibilities, or anything else without the unfinished work sitting in the back of your mind.
If you cannot complete four hours when you first begin, start with what you can do and gradually build toward it.
Four hours is the baseline.
Once you have completed those four hours, your day was a success.
Whatever else happens, happens.
Anything beyond four hours is extra.
How long should you keep doing this?
Forever.
Until the end of your days.
This is not a 30-day challenge, a temporary productivity sprint, or some hack you use until your motivation disappears.
The basic standard is meant to become your permanent way of working.
At first, it will feel like something you are deliberately forcing yourself to do.
Eventually, you stop thinking about it as a productivity system.
It is simply how you work.
Talk later,
Matt