TITLE: How Much Work Does it Take to be a Successful Mathematician?
QUESTION [95 upvotes]: Hi Everyone,
Famous anecdotes of G.H. Hardy relay that his work habits consisted of working no more than four hours a day in the morning and then reserving the rest of the day for cricket and tennis. Apparently his best ideas came to him when he wasn't "doing work." Poincare also said that he solved problems after working on them intensely, getting stuck and then letting his subconscious digest the problem. This is communicated in another anecdote where right as he stepped on a bus he had a profound insight in hyperbolic geometry.
I am less interested in hearing more of these anecdotes, but rather I am interested in what people consider an appropriate amount of time to spend on doing mathematics in a given day if one has career ambitions of eventually being a tenured mathematician at a university. 
I imagine everyone has different work habits, but I'd like to hear them and in particular I'd like to hear how the number of hours per day spent doing mathematics changes during different times in a person's career: undergrad, grad school, post doc and finally while climbing the faculty ladder. "Work" is meant to include working on problems, reading papers, math books, etcetera (I'll leave the question of whether or not answering questions on MO counts as work to you). Also, since teaching is considered an integral part of most mathematicians' careers, it might be good to track, but I am interested in primarily hours spent on learning the preliminaries for and directly doing research.
I ask this question in part because I have many colleagues and friends in computer science and physics, where pulling late nights or all-nighters is commonplace among grad students and even faculty. I wonder if the nature of mathematics is such that putting in such long hours is neither necessary nor sufficient for being "successful" or getting a post-doc/faculty job at a good university. In particular, does Malcom Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule apply to mathematicians?
Happy Holidays!

REPLY [24 votes]: Every excellent mathematician that I know works extremely hard and for very long hours; however there are many others who also work extremely hard who are just average or "journeyman" mathematicians.
In other words, hard work is necessary but not sufficient - the existence of prodigies such as the Terry Taos and Akshay Venkateshs (just to name two Aussies that I've at least met) seems to me to be sufficient evidence that some natural talent/creativity/imagination/genius is necessary beyond mere hard work. 
The working habits of mathematicians can also be endlessly amusing - we currently have a visitor who feels that he is full of creative energy immediately on waking, and so rather than getting out of bed and wasting that energy showering and having breakfast etc., he puts in an hour or two of maths and only starts the daily routine when he reaches his first dip in energy.