When It’s Time to Focus, 90 is the Magic Number
That’s 90 as in the 90-minute time-block.
But why 90?
The 90-minute time-block is our body’s sweet spot for focus. As Tony Schwartz, author of the NYT best-selling The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working Anymore writes, “Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes” (Schwartz x).
When you have work to do, 90-minutes is a useful time block for getting things done and staying focused. For those who have issues with procrastination, having a time limit can do wonders to keep focus and create an artificial time crunch.
Schwartz writes, “Our lives are undeniably marathons, but the secret is to break our long and winding road into shorter sprints…We’re hard-wired…to work at high-intensity for limited periods of time and then rest and refuel.” We do better when we focus for an intense 90 minutes, and then rest or shift to something that requires less focus. Then later, return to the intense activity” (Schwartz xi).
Here’s how it looks:
Sit down at the beginning of the week and look at your workload. (It’s best to plan one-week ahead, but if you plan day-to-day, start with that for now.) Have a project? Multiple projects? Have a to-do-list? Have calls to make? Break those down into 90-minute increments. For large projects, break them down into 90-minute time blocks.
Block off your calendar for 90-minute increments. Stop notifications. If you have a door, close it.
Dive in.
If your energy flags during the 90 minutes, that’s normal. Pause for 1 minute. Breath deeply. Look out a window or close your eyes. Stand up. Stretch. (Some people break the 90-minutes into 25-minute stretches with 5-minute breaks in between, also known as the Pomodoro Method.) After a quick break, dive back in for the remaining time.
When your 90 minutes is up, take a break. Take a walk. Take care of the easier things on your to-do list. Chat with someone. Get some air.
When you’re refreshed, come back to your project again.
But it’s summer now. I don’t need this in the summer, right? I’ll have lots of extra time.
Good point! But summer, in particular, can be a tease. With big blocks of time ahead of us we often think we’ll have a lot of time. But those blocks of time often get interrupted if we don’t set aside focus time.
This means that the 90-minute time-block is even more useful in the summer.
So this summer, or whenever you have hours of unstructured time, use 90 minute time-blocks. (By all means, also keep the unstructured time if you have it!) Keep your focus on one main topic for that time, and then get back to the other things in your life beckoning for attention (and there is likely no shortage of that).
The 90-minute time-block is a useful one when time is both limited and unlimited.
It helps with focus and – bonus – it only works if you take a break afterward!
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Schwartz, Tony. The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working Anymore. Free Press: New York. 2010.