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Debunking the "1,000 hours of practice" myth
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Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 14, 2011 at 12:48 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
> ?Deliberate practice requires focus and concentration, which makes it mentally taxing and not likely to be a lot of fun. A finding across disciplines > is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit. ?If you?re practicing with your mind, you couldn?t possibly keep it up all day.??
In the last couple of months I’ve been tracking my pure productive time (when I’m actually focusing and working on my project sitting at the PC) with a manual stopwatch and a spreadsheet. I found that my average productive time is 4.5 hrs per day. I’ve now restructured my daily schedule to make sure I achieve no less and no more (overachieving in one week led to underachieving in the following week).
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 14, 2011 at 03:30 PM
Alexander, thanks for referencing my post on benefits of getting an early start. Indeed, I believe many, if not most of us, may have times of days which are better suited to some tasks more than to others.
More recently I wrote another blog post which may also have relevance to this discussion - it looks at the notion of conscious awareness being beneficial, especially when we face the experience of overwhelm. I suggest that mindfulness practice enables the kind of conscious awareness which enables us to experience and react in a useful manner to those thoughts which interfere with our ability to be focused, and to work in an optimal manner.
This blog post may be found here: http://www.exuberanteclectic.com/2011/10/conscious-awareness-key-to-getting.html
The operative words in the article Dr Andus introduced may be in its title: If You?re Busy, You?re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers - and those words are “surprisingly relaxed.”
We think of relaxation as something we do when we are not working, as the antithesis of work - but my experience, distorted as it often has been with issues related to ADHD and executive dysfunction, is that my best intellectual activity, or my best work as a chaplain or therapist, has occurred in the so-called flow state, which to me is very similar to being relaxed.
I think as research accumulates with regard to mindfulness practice, it may be said our best chance of achieving that kind of state may be through regular practice. It may not make us gifted in what we do, but it will perhaps shift our relationship to the stuff of our life in a way which enables a more relaxed approach. And with that go notions such as being focused, have greater awareness, being able to learn and understand without “friction,” and so on. Having said that, I need to emphasize one does not practice mindfulness for any “goal” or “purpose” other than the practice. So while it is true certain contexts of our life - stress, overwhelm, chronic pain, grief - may lead to our taking up the practice, we do not do so with a specific goal.
Daly
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Some thoughts after reading through this fascinating discussion:
>
>- Sometime ago
>Daly wrote a post on getting up early
>http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2817 I believe in circadian
>body/mind rhythms and know that, regardless of the tools, I will be best at doing
>different things at different times of the day: 5:00-8:00 for texts, 8:00-11:00 for
>organisation, 11:00-14:00 for focused discussions, 14:00- 16:00 for physical
>exercise, 16:00-18:00 for social communication, 18:00-... for delving on
>technical problems (whose solutions will probably be manifest after a good night’s
>sleep) etc. These are indicative times but for me they work. Many of my productivity
>problems have to do with doing the wrong thing at the wrong time…
>
>- Re focus /
>concentration: it may indeed be a matter of discipline, but the surrounding
>conditions can facilitate it or make it more difficult. Is it surprising that many of
>us look back to DOS days, JB swears by Emacs Org-mode and full text editors like
>ZenWriter, Q10, WriteMonkey etc. abound? I only switched from WordPerfect 5.1’s
>‘darkroom’ environment to Windows editors when I could no longer run it… When
>working on texts early in the morning I will disable PopPeeper’s auto-checking of
>mails, because I find even its tiny static flag notification distracting.
>
>- I
>believe that software can indeed help as Dr Andus suggested, even without AI; much of
>the software we discussed here offers specific views to our data. IMHO, the ideal tool
>would provide (a) different representations of structured relationships, i.e.
>concept mapping, tabular, outline etc. and (b) zoomable views to those
>representations. The latter is very important and surprisingly missing from most
>offerings. Even more, when zoomable views are provided e.g. in TreeSheets, they
>treat all info at a certain level as of equal value. Yet just as on a geographical map
>there are landmarks and we will often visualise France with an out-of-proportion
>Eiffel Tower at its centre, so we may need to have such ‘landmarks’ in our data too.
>
Posted by JBfrom
Nov 14, 2011 at 03:48 PM
Correct. Conscious outcome orientation removes one from flow, because it precipitates a cascade of conscious attempts to take control from the subconscious.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 14, 2011 at 04:03 PM
Attachment to conscious outcome is not a useful outcome orientation.
Conscious awareness of what one’s desired outcome is at the time one needs to be aware of it can be very useful.
In the context of mindfulness one can be aware of something in a manner which does not precipitate a struggle between the conscious and subconscious. If a sense of struggle arises, then it can be recognized as such, and observed. The sense of struggle will dissolve.
Mindfulness may allow one to be aware of that which normally is not part of conscious awareness.
When that awareness is of, for example, a thought about our work, or the way we are feeling, of about the future, that is not helpful, we then have an opportunity to accept it as it is, and to look at alternate ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Daly
JBfrom wrote:
>Correct. Conscious outcome orientation removes one from flow, because it
>precipitates a cascade of conscious attempts to take control from the subconscious.
Posted by Hugh
Nov 14, 2011 at 04:14 PM
I believe that flow is a useful concept. Kitchen timers can be useful! The various Pomodoro applications have been mentioned. For Mac users there are also Concentrate and Vitamin R among others. A book has been written entitled ‘Creating Flow with Omnifocus’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
http://getconcentrating.com/
http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/index.html
http://usingomnifocus.com/