Peace of Mind Organizing

Give yourself a power hour

27 April 2011

I had a client cancellation on Monday and found myself with about six hours of desk time that I hadn’t been expecting. Bliss.

Thanks to Mark Forster’s Superfocus task-management system (of which I’m an unabashed fan), I didn’t have to try to remember all the stuff I needed to do.

So I started working the list and got a couple of fairly major things done that had been lingering there forever. I looked at the clock and realized that I had about an hour before a phone appointment and I decided to give myself a Power Hour. I told myself that I would try to cross 10 things off my list in the next hour.

Oh my goodness, it was great! I worked through my task notebook, following the SuperFocus rules (meaning that I had to at least start at least one thing per page of my list — I had about 11 pages) and I got some really great things done. There were a couple of software programs and other resources I’d been meaning to look into that I made decisions on. There was an email glitch that had been plaguing me for literally months that I found a solution for. (Hooray!) By the hour’s end, I had completed ten tasks. (I kept track of how many tasks I’d accomplished with simple ticks on a scrap of paper.) I felt very accomplished and jazzed up when I finished the hour.

Power Hour is obviously good for ticking off one-off tasks that tend to accumulate. But it can also be useful for just getting started on some tasks. Something about the focus of the hour and the drive to achieve the goal of getting a certain number of tasks crossed off in that time was really motivating.

If you find yourself with an extra hour (or even a half hour) and a long to-do list, I urge you to give it a shot!

Tagged with: mark forster, productivity, superfocus, time management

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