If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/

A great post describing the how researchers asked  a music academy’s professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.

To summarize:

• The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
• average players are dedicating hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
• average players spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin

In conclusion

The important concept to take away that Hard Work is Different than Hard to Do Work.  Busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy.

• Hard work  – The 20% that achieves the highest results  – but could be very tough at the time to do
• Hard to do work– the 80% that fills the rest of the day and in retrospect could be the major factor for busyness and exhaustion 

Related articles

• Practice strategies of super elite performers: Sleep your way to creativity (onewildword.com)
• A New Theory of Elite Performance (greatergood.berkeley.edu)