Some of the most prolific figures in literature, math, and science spent only four-to-five ours doing their most creative and profound work. The rest of the time, they focused their attention on spending time with family and friends and taking advantage of rest as much as possible. In short, creative productivity is not based on the number of hours... See more

More hours of work don’t mean an increase in productivity — quite the opposite, actually.

Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed

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