10,000 hours calculator
At 1 hour a day, 10,000 hours of practice takes 27.4 years. Enter your schedule to see when you reach 20, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 hours.
| Milestone | Time left | You reach it |
|---|---|---|
| 20 hours | 20 days | – |
| 100 hours | 14 weeks | – |
| 1,000 hours | 2.7 years | – |
| 10,000 hours | 27.4 years | – |
To reach 10,000 hours in years, practice 2.7 hours a day.
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 the 20-hour rule in 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. Most personal skill goals sit in this range:
- 20 to 100 hours: reaching functional competence under the 20-hour rule, hand-knitting an adult sweater (20 to 80 hours), or playing simple songs on the ukulele.
- 100 to 200 hours: beginner foundations on the guitar or piano, advancing past 1000 rating in chess (50 to 150 hours), or basic beginner sign language, Japanese (A1) and Spanish.
- 500 to 1,500 hours: conversational sign language (490 to 600 hours), intermediate ukulele or guitar (600 to 640 hours), building confidence in drawing fundamentals, or work-level Norwegian (960 hours), Spanish or French (1,200 hours) and German (1,440 hours).
- 960 to 3,520 hours: the full range for learning a language for work, up to Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean at 3,520 hours.
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.