We treat the eight-hour day as an acceptable day’s work, but many celebrated figures did their best thinking in just four or five hours a day — and that deliberate rest may have been key

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Sit down to do real work, the kind that asks something of your brain, and notice how long you can actually hold it. Charles Dickens wrote from roughly nine to two. Henri Poincaré, the mathematician, worked just enough to get his mind around a problem, about four hours a day. G.H. Hardy thought four hours ... Read more