10,000 hours calculator

At 1 hour a day, 10,000 hours of practice takes 27.4 years. Enter your own schedule to see when you'll reach each milestone. To finish by a set year, change the years at the bottom and you'll see how many hours a day you need.

How does the calculator work?

It adds up the hours you practice in a week. Then it divides the hours you have left by that number.

• Hours a week = hours a day × days a week. 1 hour × 7 days = 7 hours.
• Time left = (goal − hours done so far) ÷ hours a week. 10,000 ÷ 7 = 1,429 weeks, or 27.4 years.
• Hours a day to finish on time = hours left ÷ (years × 52.18 weeks × days a week). 10,000 ÷ (10 × 52.18 × 7) = 2.7 hours a day.

The dates assume you practice on the same schedule every week and never take a break. Your real weeks won't be that even. Update your hours done every few weeks and you'll get new dates.

Why 20, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 hours?

20 hours comes from Josh Kaufman's book The First 20 Hours. He says 20 hours of focused practice is enough to learn the basics of a new skill.

10,000 hours comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Gladwell based it on a 1993 study of violin students. Later research found that the hours you need depend on the skill and on how good you want to get. Read what the research says about the 10,000-hour rule.

100 and 1,000 hours are the steps in between. At 1 hour a day, you reach 100 hours in about 3 months and 1,000 hours in under 3 years.

How do you count your practice hours?

The calculator needs to know how many hours you have practiced so far. If you time each practice session, you can enter your real total instead of a guess. In timespent, create a Timed Activity for your skill and set a weekly goal of 7 hours. Start the timer each time you practice. timespent adds up your hours for each week and for all time. Enter your all-time total in the "Hours done so far" box above.