☕️ saturday mornings #12
being nice, crushing hard work & sleeping soundly
Happy Saturday all,
Thanks for tuning in and spending a bit of your morning with me. I know your time, and inbox, are extremely valuable.
Let’s dig into some of the coolest things and ideas I’ve been exploring over the past week. Hope you enjoy.
Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Article I’ve been pondering:
The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done by Oliver Burkeman (2 min)
This article centres around the idea of time management and suggests “you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day”. The author then pulls many examples of famous historical figures who, while completing some of their best work, structured periods of concentration summing to three to four hours across their entire day.
The idea is similar to the main message of Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work. Deep work is defined as the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. The author believes that people require this kind of distraction-free time to engage in deep work, which enables one to learn new things more quickly and produce at an elite level. He similarly pulls in examples of famous thinkers and writers who used this strategy, such as Carl Jung, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Dickens.
For me, this message functions on two levels.
One, to complete my best work, I need to create blocks of undistracted time to focus on that work. This means setting aside at least two hours, typically when my energy levels are highest, where I can get into a work rhythm. This involves putting away my phone, refusing to check email, and just focusing on the task at hand. I’ve found this approach allows me to get higher-quality work done faster, helps with understanding, disaggregating, and solving difficult problems. It also often feels less frustrating as I’m not caught wasting time in a semi-leisure, semi-work mode. It’s been a real game-changer for work in university.
Two, the human brain is only capable of this level of work for three to four hours per day. As such, once you hit that mark of focused work, although there may still be more to do, pushing past can often be destructive to long-term productivity and lead to burn-out. I’m not advising to only do three to four hours of work per day, but rather three to four hours of intense, cognitively demanding work. Outside of these blocks of time can be used to send emails, have phone calls or meetings, or work on tasks that require less focus (where you can sing along with Ed Sheeran).
The author of the article reminds us:
“The truly valuable skill here isn't the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people's demands unfulfilled.”
As Mr. Newport claims:
“I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. 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.”
Similarly, I was listening to a presentation by a Stanford University Neurobiologist, who believed one of the most valuable skills to develop is to learn how to focus and learn how to de-focus; learn how to flip the switch on, and learn how to flip the switch off.
The impact of leveraging this model to approach work has been used successfully and had a large impact on some of the “most productive” humans from the past several hundred years.
If you’re interested in experimenting with deep work, you can also check out the Pomodoro technique which asks you to alternate pomodoros - focused work sessions - with frequent short breaks to promote sustained concentration and stave off mental fatigue. It typically follows a 25-minute work to 5-minute break cadence.
If you’d like to learn more, I’d highly recommend checking out the article.
Challenge for the week ahead:
Sleep for 8 hours a night
Oftentimes when people think about improving their health, their mind goes right to cleaning up their diet, going for a run, or getting a gym membership. However, as research is beginning to indicate, sleep is one of the largest, if not the largest, factor in our health.
As such, it becomes interesting that health enthusiasts (myself included) are sticklers around getting to the gym six times a week or never eating junk food, but often lack a similar strict nature when it comes to protecting and preserving their 8 hours of sleep. Especially as sleeping could be categorized as more enjoyable than forking down pallets of chicken and broccoli or deadlifting 300 pounds.
This disparity, as far as I can tell, exists for two reasons. One, companies have much less room to make millions of dollars. It’s hard to monetize a good night’s sleep. Two, until recently, very little scientific evidence has existed to answer why people sleep and precisely what the benefits are.
Matthew Walker, PhD, spent 20 years trying to answer the question: why do humans sleep? In his research, he uncovered the biological importance of sleep and the risks of failing to get enough sleep.
In fact, “two-third of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep”. He then writes in his New York Times bestselling book,
“Routinely sleeping less than 6-7 hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep – even moderate reductions for just one week – disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke and congestive heart failure. Sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depressions, anxiety and suicidality.”
A Stanford Neuroscientist holds similar beliefs, stating:
"Start with sleep. Figure it out. Figure out how to get your sleep right because it’s the fundamental layer of mental health.”
To sum up, if you add the above health consequences up, a proven link becomes evident: “the shorter you sleep the shorter your lifespan”.
Not to be too distressing, Mr. Walker spent his entire working career researching sleep, so it makes sense he’s passionate and a little over the top about this stuff.
However, to bring it back to being actionable, I’m trying to approach sleep this week with a bit of a scientific lens. I plan to aim for 8 hours of sleep each night, record my best estimate of how much sleep I get each night, and gauge how correlated it is with my mental and physical state throughout the day. Although it’s not sustainable to track sleep for weeks, hopefully this experiment will actualize some of Mr. Walker’s research and help solidify the importance of prioritizing sleep.
If you’re curious as well, I’d encourage you to check out his book or do research for yourself.
That’s all from me for this week and today’s edition of saturday mornings.
Hopefully you enjoyed some of the sections and were able to take away a couple of interesting or helpful points.
And, as always, I’d love to hear any feedback from you. Which topic above is your favourite? What do you want more or less of? What challenges and ideas are you exploring and grappling with or have found particularly interesting?
Have a restful weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas