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Hello and welcome to Quick Fix How To's Slate Plus segment. I'm Courtney Martin. Today's main episode

featured a conversation with Oliver Berkman, author of the bestseller 4,000 Weeks, Time Management

for Mortals. In the book and in our episode, he mentioned an exercise for slowing down when

life gets hectic. The exercise is from Harvard professor Jennifer Roberts,

who assigned this to her art students. The task, stare at a piece of art for three hours. Yes,

three. Now, it may sound like a recipe for boredom, but it is actually an exercise in deep observation.

She gave the students 16 categories in which they could analyze the art, things like lines,

fabrication, light, and of course, by slowing down and doing deep observation, it's also

an exercise in patience. This is such a fun idea that we decided to send two

of our producers, Joel and Rosie, into the field to give it a go. They did reduce the experiment to

one hour, partially because that seems like a more realistic bite of time for listeners to replicate,

and for a few other reasons. I'll let them explain.

Yeah, so I mean, the choice to reduce this from three hours to one hour was both you and I

acknowledging that like we're not superhuman and that sitting in a public museum looking at art

at a single piece of art for three hours could attract

attention. I mean, I think people do it all the time, right? Like you see people sketching or painting

or like clearly doing some kind of study in a museum. But like that's not me in three hours.

It seems like a really long time. Yeah. So we did it for an hour, which I have to say after an hour, I was like, that was a long time to sit in one place at a museum. I don't think I've ever done that before. I definitely haven't either. Prior to going to the museum today, the New York Times had an interactive where they essentially took you through this exercise in just 10 minutes.

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