What if we worked like Greek tragedies every day?
How to get important work done without endless task switching even if you have a packed schedule.
I remember studying Joe De Graft’s Sons and Daughters in my high school literature class.
It’s a play about a wealthy Ghanaian family. The father has compelled his children into careers they don’t want. Aaron wants to be a graphic artist. Maanan dreams of dancing. Their father wants an engineer and a lawyer instead.
The entire play unfolded in one location: the family house. The drama was resolved within a single day, and a single central conflict drove the resolution (ending).
I didn’t like the play because I thought, why would someone write a play that ends like that?
We didn’t see the characters going to bed or travelling to another city, but the play was compelling enough for a complete reading in less than an hour.
I recall my teacher explaining that De Graft employed Aristotle’s three unities: action, time and place. One main plot in one location over one day. The play was included in the national curriculum, so it was worth our learning we had been told.
As for the structure of the play, these were the classical rules of drama, the framework that made Greek tragedies so intense and engaging.
Fast forward to this day. I’m considering increasing my daily output so I can improve outcomes for my clients.
What if, I thought, there’s some productive insight to learn from that structure of Greek drama?
Unity of action, time, and place
Aristotle’s three unities, which Sons and Daughters reminds me of, were one of the strongest impressions of a 24-hour conceptual force I could recall.
What does this have to do with productivity?
But first, let me clarify a misconception.
What Aristotle actually said about a Greek tragedy is that a play should focus on one main storyline (unity of action) without meandering subplots, and casually added that tragedies tend to occur within “one revolution of the sun.”
It was not until the 16th and 17th centuries that Renaissance Italian and French critics began attributing a rigid “three unities” framework to Aristotle.
French dramatists like Racine and Corneille picked up these rules with utmost devotion, creating tight, intense dramas in which everything happened now, here, with these stakes.
It adopts the notion that tragedy befalls people suddenly and is concluded quickly.
And though Aristotle never said tragedies needed to occur in one place, they took his hints and turned them into a tradition that De Graft followed.
In contrast, Shakespeare wrote his plays however he wanted. His plays span years and continents, juggle multiple storylines. That’s why it takes several subplots, characters, divine interventions, or deus ex machina (using a machine to lower an actor portraying a god onto the stage), and so on to pull off a Shakespearean piece.
What makes the unity of time, place, and action effective, especially for smaller plays, is that the constraints it imposes intensify the story.
That is, if you can’t escape to another location or delay until tomorrow, you must confront everything immediately.
As with other things in life, some deadlines are inevitable.
You must finish certain bits of work at the office or at an exhibition, the market, or wherever else your job takes you within a day to claim success.
Many modern productivity experts whose books you may have read eventually reach the same conclusion: what you achieve in a day matters.
Some people approach their jobs like soap operas, as if they have the entire season to achieve one thing and go on pushing tasks forward.
They act as if all their work is inextricably tied to that of others, to the point that they permit others to enter and exit their schedules at random.
In one day, you’re at the office, at a client’s, and later, at home. Endless subplots. Shifting locations. Day after day without resolution.
No matter how organised you are, this kind of structure isn’t optimal because you’re trying to create focused work in a format designed for perpetual distraction.
All of that comes at a measurable cognitive cost. Research shows that the average knowledge worker switches between apps nearly 1,200 times per day, losing about four hours each week just reorienting themselves.
When you switch contexts, it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain focus. This “context switching” reduces productivity by up to 40% and costs the global economy an estimated $450 billion annually.
Making a workday as intense as a Greek tragedy
Cal Newport calls it “Deep Work.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it “Flow.” But the core insight is similar.
You accomplish meaningful work every day when you impose dramatic constraints.
So instead of treating your day like a soap opera, structure one part of it like a Greek tragedy.
If you do not have ample control over your workday, planning to control every aspect would be unrealistic.
Create a 4-hour “act” with its own unities.
Research on focus and productivity suggests starting with smaller blocks (90 minutes to 4 hours) and gradually building up your capacity for sustained concentration.
Who knows? If making the most of your day through this practice increases your productivity, you might gain a promotion, which could give you greater control over your workdays.
Unity of Action
Choose to start your day with one key or primary task (the protagonist). This one gets the dramatic priority.
This one must be urgent and important.
This is the task that, if achieved, will make your day successful and determine the weight of the secondary functions for that day.
Everything else is either:
Small tasks that directly advance the main task
Background or admin work
Different play entirely (defer it)
If you have a project for which you must commit 20 work hours, divide it into acts of no more than 4 hours each work day. You can complete secondary tasks using the time remaining after your primary task is completed.
Once you achieve this core action (plot) within your allocated time, the curtain closes.
Unity of Time
Greek tragedies resolved by sunset.
Your morning act needs a hard deadline.
Set a specific time window: “This drama runs from 9 AM to 1 PM.” Not “I’ll work on this today.” Not “whenever I finish.”
It should be a time block of 90 minutes (minimum) to 4 hours (maximum).
When the timer ends, the curtain falls. This compels you to complete the task you choose within this period.
Whatever state you’re in becomes the resolution, complete, incomplete, or somewhere between.
The play will end when you’re out of time, so you’d better make each scene count.
Unity of Place
In Greek tragedy, the stage doesn’t change. You can’t escape to a different location when things get hard. This constraint should compel you to finish your protagonist task in that location before you leave.
This is a primary location, not necessarily a spot. If you’re spending the day at the office, it doesn’t mean you can’t use the toilet or heat your food in the kitchen.
What’s important here is the effect that leaving this space has on your primary task. If you change location, would the drama pause or, worse, end abruptly?
The essence of this constraint is to prevent you from exercising negative freedom, doing anything you want or feel like that isn’t your core task.
Designate a physical or digital stage for your key task of the day.
This might be:
A specific room, chair, or workstation
A full-screen application with all other tabs closed
Noise-canceling headphones that block out all noise
Make your success inevitable
The three unities create what the Greeks called inevitability.
When characters can’t escape their location or expand time, and when the plot can’t be broken into subplots, everything becomes essential. Every action matters. Every moment counts.
This is exactly what happens in deep work or flow states.
Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as a state where people are “so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.” You’re characterized by intense concentration, integrated action and awareness, and a distorted sense of time (not 8 or 24 hours, but 4 hours at most).
You wake up every day and enter a bounded space and time with a clear focus, so that the only thing you can do is to accomplish something, not to procrastinate or move about like you own the place, but to get one thing done.
One scene (smaller action) leads to the next, and your work builds momentum, tension, and narrative arc.
The narrative arc is a straightforward statement that would satisfy the curiosity of someone who asked, “What did you achieve today?”
Let me add here that by the end of your 4-hour act, something feels resolved. Not necessarily finished, but addressed.
Why?
Greek tragedies often ended in ambiguity, but were resolved. You confronted the task. You moved it forward in a meaningful way. So, there’s closure, even if the larger project continues tomorrow.
Aristotle never intended the three unities to be universal rules, but was describing what he observed in the best tragedies of his time. The best plays in his day.
In those days, speaking, acting, and dancing were all they had, so they best plays really nailed it with these unities.
As for the Renaissance critics who turned his observations into a rigid doctrine? They were accidentally right about focus. I don’t think, as some say, that Shakespeare beat them. I think Shakespeare proved that plays of his day needed to change and that his writing was better suited to his time.
In this age, we face numerous distractions and have unstructured processes that hinder our success, even at work.
The three unities may be wrongly attributed to Aristotle, but they’re at least a model for addressing the lack of structure that prevents some people from getting meaningful work done.