No. He is not asking for 4 hours of work. He is asking for laser-focused, 100% productive 4 hours work. You can do additional work in the rest of the hours left that not necessarily is going to require that level of focus.

Correct (?) link (it's quite high up in TFA):

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433?s=20

> My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.

> Now true - some people, myself included, need a few hours to wind up and wind down for those to occur. Right now I'm procrastinating on twitter instead of writing my summit talk for instance. Reddit and HN are my siren calls.

> That's fine. We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome. What's even better than people are teams. Friends, that go on journeys doing difficult things.

While I'm sure they want people to do some non-creactive work - it sounds like in principle they'd be fine with 20 hours of focused creative work. Maybe a 6 hour day, to put in 4 hours of work?

I think some of it has to be taken as more of an adage than pragmatically. Firsly, the four hours may not be continuous so having random hours doesn't really work. Additionally, it's caveated with creative work, regardless of job title, a lot of work would involve non-creative aspects which need to be done.

Because there's meetings, email, IMs, documentation, waiting, etc. The rough breakdown is 20 hours of focused creative work and 20 hours of everything else per week.

I think he's assuming that people are going to spend some fraction of their time at work advancing their careers and maintaining their relationships with coworkers (and that he does not include that time as "creative work").

You cannot work at 100% in 4 uninterrupted hours. You need to take some breaks in between, and also do some mundane things.

He’s asking for 4 hours of creative work, with the assumption being that the balance won’t be creative.