Are 24 hours enough?

There was too much on my plate. I looked at the clock and thought, “How can 24 hours possibly be enough?” Everything felt urgent. Everything demanded my time. But instead of letting that chaos take over, I tried a small experiment.

And the results completely changed how I think about time and productivity.

The Focus Sprint Experiment

Here’s what I did – it’s nothing complicated, but it worked better than anything I’ve tried before:

I picked just one important task. Not a list. Just one thing that truly mattered and needed to be done.
I gave myself full permission to ignore everything else. Emails, messages, other tasks – they could wait.
I turned off my phone and set a 50-minute timer using a Chrome extension.
I worked with full focus for 50 minutes. No task-switching. Whenever a distraction popped into my head, I just wrote it down for later.
After the sprint, I took a break. No rush, no pressure. Just enough rest to reset before the next round.

I repeated this process a few times throughout the day.

Here’s What Happened

By the third sprint, I was already starting to feel mentally full. After lunch, I pushed for a few more rounds, but by the sixth one, I was done.

Totally drained.

At that point, I had clocked just 300 minutes of deep, focused work — roughly five hours. And you know what? That was all I had in me. That was my true limit for meaningful, high-quality output.

Not 8 hours. Not 12 hours. Just 5.

So Why Do We Feel Like There’s Never Enough Time?

It’s not a time problem. It’s an attention problem.

Most of what fills our days isn’t deep work. It’s shallow work — answering emails, replying to chats, jumping between meetings, clearing out to-do lists. It keeps us busy, but it doesn’t move the needle.

We end the day feeling exhausted, yet we often haven’t done the thing that really mattered.

That’s the trap: being busy is not the same as being productive.

Stop Managing Time — Start Managing Attention

Time is constant. Everyone gets the same 24 hours.

But attention? That’s limited. Easily hijacked. And far more valuable.

When you give your full attention to one meaningful task at a time, everything changes. You get more done in less time. You feel clearer. And you stop living in constant reaction mode.

So if you ever feel like 24 hours aren’t enough, try this: