Productive work ≠ hard work: "Experiment with violinist"

There are people who are constantly busy, but their efficiency tends to zero. At the same time, the other can work for the amount of time is less than or the same, but the time to do many times more, and, interestingly, the better.

Work productively and work a lot - they are completely different things. And the results, respectively, are different. Number of Newport, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently an assistant professor in the Georgetown University, has been studying how the workflow built successful people. I think you, too, will be interested to learn about some interesting and useful discoveries about personal effectiveness. This time on the example of students-violinists Universität der Künste.

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Let's start with a brief description of the study.

Experiment

In the early 1990s in the Universität der Künste came three psychologists. They decided to study the methods of work of violinists. Students who participated in the study were divided into two groups. The first group - the elite. These are the musicians who predicted a great future and brilliant career as a violinist in the most famous orchestras in the world. The second group - the students who after graduation will become music teachers. Then all of them distributed notebooks and asked to record everything they do during the day. In this case, a 24-hour day was divided into intervals for a period of 50 minutes.

After the end of the experiment, psychologists have collected notebooks and now they needed to carefully examine the data and drawn from them certain conclusions. One of the first possible conclusions that can be done by looking at the more successful violinists, is that they are likely to work on his technique a lot more than those who are unlikely to go beyond the teacher music. But in fact, the results were not so unambiguous.

After processing, the notebooks of students, psychologists have found that both groups are working on their technique about the same amount of time. As "elite" and "average" spending on musical practice about 3-3.5 hours a day. The difference is in how they practiced and how generally built their standard school day.

results

So, it turned out that the "elite violinists' spend on practice as much as the students from the middle group. Why do we have such a difference? It turns out that the whole thing is how they practiced and how to build a standard working day (we will not take into account the genius, because hardly one university to collect as much of the future and Bach Beethoven).

1. The amount of violinists from the "elite group" spent on the practice as much time as everyone else, but this time they have in common three times more spent on "deliberate practice" - it is not very comfortable, methodical work on stretching your abilities. That is, it is the work on the technique of execution, when you lose again and again the same passages, until they sound perfect. And playing these should be thoughtful, meaningful, and not occur automatically. Because if on autopilot mode you suddenly bring down, go back and find the right note or passage is very difficult and often have to play it all over again. During the same deliberate practice, you track every note, you know exactly what you are playing a passage, which notes that precede and follow them. In such a case, and if you knock, you can instantly start playing from the same place.

2. The working day of violinists from the "elite group" was clearly laid out for working and non-working hours. They did not mix with the rest practice. Generally, working time has been divided into two parts, between which there was a time of rest. And the work has been chosen precisely so that it falls on the productivity peaks, ie in the morning and the afternoon. And these students slept an hour longer than the students from the second group.

The second group of students "smeared" his practice all day. And instead of the several hours of concentrated work, they received a day, fully stocked practice and without clear boundaries recreation. And in the end even though the fact that they practiced as much and violinists from the "elite group", the results were much worse, they slept less and feel more tired.

Based on the results we can say with confidence that the productive work and work a lot - it made not one and the same. Did you learn or build a career if you want to live a full life if you want it to work I bring you pleasure and tangible results, while employment and attrition have become your sworn enemies.

If you are a day twist, like a squirrel in a wheel, very tired, and enough sleep - it is a sure sign that you are properly allocate their efforts and are doing something wrong in the process. So you need to revise it, using the rule of 20%, discard all unnecessary, to do the work more focused and, finally, begin to enjoy your free time.

From my own I want to add that some people mistakenly think that if you do not fly to your work (in my case, to a computer) at the weekend, so you do not love your job. If you like what you are doing, then it should not be a burden. But I can tell you that sometimes the two days spent away from the tool, give such a refreshing effect, which will not give you even a two-week vacation with a rare working peeping in mail. To separate work and leisure, even if it is very, very, very interesting job, you need to! It is in these moments you can think of can come new and interesting ideas.