We’ve all heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. This was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. His idea was this: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a world-class expert in any skillful field. He uses examples such as the Beatles and Bill Gates: both are world-renowned experts in their respective fields, and both practiced more than 10,000 hours. Therefore, 10,000 hours must make an expert in the field of choice.

However, time isn’t the only factor in improvement. What if you could get stronger in 3 seconds a day? Research is emerging that the quantity of time invested isn’t as important as the quality of time invested. By focusing on the time spent instead of the desired results, we’re hemorrhaging our ability to improve and putting in substantially more effort than required, all at the same time. 10,000 hours is a lie that makes you less productive.

The origin of the misconception

Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule didn’t invent our society’s favor of time and effort over productivity and improvement. Many of these downsides of focusing on hours over yield have been around a lot longer than his 2008 book. However, he did popularize the idea with a catchy phrase that makes it hard to see the downsides this approach imposes, so his book is worth talking about.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, describes that 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness. From Wikipedia: “Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of the Beatles' musical talents and Gates' computer savvy as examples. The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time the Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, and quotes a Beatles' biographer, Philip Norman, as claiming “So by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, ‘they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.'” Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.”

His argument, essentially, is that 10,000 hours is necessary for greatness. However, Malcolm is making a post hoc fallacy, falsely equivocating that because his examples practiced 10,000 hours and became world experts, the practice sufficiently caused their expertise. That isn’t necessarily true. Just because the two events both occur, doesn’t imply that they’re causal. An absurdist example: cheese consumption is linked with dying by bedsheet tangling (and a few other equally nonsensical correlations). Causation does not equal correlation. We’ll write more on logical fallacies later.

Back to Malcolm Gladwell. His idea about 10,000 hours largely was derived from a 1993 paper called The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. The read on the paper wasn’t quite right either. In this paper, scientists determined that, on average, students who were expert violinists practiced 10,000 hours. Average, by definition, suggests that some students practice more, and some less. The paper itself states in its abstract that: “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years”. The paper is primarily concerned with whether innate talent is the leading cause of mastery, not with the specifics of exactly how long those people spent practicing. Recent literature suggests that mastery closely relates to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. The research is clear: deliberate practice is important, mindlessly accruing hours is not. I won’t go too much more here into how the 10,000 hour rule has been misleading. It’s been argued against quite extensively. I will switch the focus of this article to some of the pitfalls of the 10,000 hour (and the larger focus on hours over productivity) dogma and how we can work to avoid it.

What are the downsides?

1. Lack of Improvement

One of the big downsides of focusing on time investment rather than meaningful practice is a lack of improvement at the task at hand. Let’s use cooking as an example. On average, Americans spend 37 minutes a day preparing food. That means that it would take roughly 16,216 days or 42 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark, which, on average, makes everyone 62 and older a world-class chef. Now, my grandmother is a great cook, but she isn’t on the level of Michelin 3 star restaurants. The reason for this isn’t a lack of time, but a lack of dedicated practice. Most people are cooking to feed themselves or their families, and not working with intentional practice. More on intentional practice later.

2. Creation of time sinks

The creation of time sinks is another big downside to this reverence of time spent working. These requirements to be in the office or on-call remotely lead to people filling in the gaps with time-wasters. The evidence for this is in studies done about shorter workweeks. It has been found that productivity stays the same or increases even with a 4 day week. So, if workers can remain just as productive without needing to spend all their time in the office, it stands to reason that there are time-wasting practices at play.

Also, none of this is to blame the workers. 8 hours a day is too long to stay meaningfully productive in the workplace. Because of our focus on time investment equally commitment and drive, it’s bad form to rest in the office, so people come up with tasks to fill time while appearing productive.

Meetings are a great example of this. It’s estimated that 15% of a company’s time is spent in meetings. This isn’t time well spent. Anecdotally, I hear stories all the time from friends about how they’re in a meeting where they are expected not to participate. A survey of senior managers said that they thought 71% of meetings were unproductive. These meetings are a product of the need to fill the workday, regardless of the need for productivity.

3. Burnout

Finally, burnout is a large issue in the emphasis on time over productivity. Burnout is a form of exhaustion that reduces productivity. With the pandemic and increasing strain on front-line healthcare workers, somewhere around 55% of those healthcare workers are experiencing burnout.

What can I do instead?

We’ve seen the issues with focusing on the time spent on a task rather than the objectives and results of that task. Instead of time, new research has begun to focus on the specifics of how to improve through practice. These studies are not recommending putting in countless hours towards mastery. Instead, they suggest that how you approach a task is more important than the time spent.

I’ll go into an example, with the study I hinted at towards the beginning of this article. A study found that their participants got stronger in 3 seconds a day (with a single curl), 5 days a week, over 4 weeks. That’s a minute spent in total over that timespan, for a 10% increase in their curling strength. How they achieved this is important. They did not just grab any weight, do a curl, and go about their day. They did a single, max-weight (for them) eccentric curl. Concentric and isometric curls provided much less benefit in the study.

The key takeaway here is that preparation for a task matters. Spend time investing in the proper ways to learn, and the proper way to improve instead of engaging in activities mindlessly. 10,000 hours is a lie. Don’t fall for it.