How many hours a day should you work?
Daily working hours, long days versus short focused days, work cut-off times.
Axis: a few focused hours a day … long hours
Answers by date: 8 records in 7 sources, newest first; the answers above are the current ones. The advice was refined (2018), never reversed, in these records.
| date | who | answer | source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-06-10 (said on 2020-06-01, implied) | Ali | Ali has a new rule for himself: he has to be productive before 10 p.m., and after 10 p.m. he is not allowed to do anything explicitly productive unless he really feels like it. | Music, Reading and Note-Taking - Productive Day in the Life 00:06:45 |
| 2018-05-29 | Ali | Ali works by task, not by time: he does not believe in working by time. | Live Stream - Hangout 00:17:40 |
| 2018-05-07 | Ali | Ali calls it a pervasive myth that you are doing something wrong if you do not work eight hours a day: studying is not about long periods of time. | Live Q&A + Hangout - Bank Holiday vibes - Ali Abdaal, Cambridge medical student 00:43:19 |
| 2018-05-01 | Ali | Asked how to study 12 hours a day for over a year, Ali says don't, and asks why anyone would want to. | First Live Hangout + Rapid-fire Q&A 00:08:43 |
| 2018-04-24 | Ali | Ali thinks the key is efficiency: you can put relatively few hours into work and still do it efficiently. | Study with Me + Revision tips from friends - Cambridge University medical student VLOG #32 00:06:23 |
| 2018-04-18 | Ali | Ali's revision day came to just under four hours, which he thinks were productive because they were built mostly around active recall and spaced repetition. | Study With Me + 10 Productivity / Revision Tips - Cambridge University medical student VLOG #31 00:07:23 |
| 2018-04-12 | Ali | Ali thinks Ibz Mo's method works quite well: eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work and eight hours of anything else you want. | Motivation, Stress & Time Management - Exam Revision Q&A with Cambridge students 00:06:25 |
| 2018-04-12 | Ali | Ali calls "how many hours should you study" a pointless question, because everyone learns at a different pace, has a different baseline intelligence and wants different grades. | Motivation, Stress & Time Management - Exam Revision Q&A with Cambridge students 00:05:55 |
Dates are upload dates, which set the order. Where the speaker gives a different recording date in the video, it is added as "said on YYYY-MM-DD, implied" (derived from the date said in the video).