27. How to Get Things Done With a Power Hour

Episode 27

In this tactical episode, we dive into a time management strategy designed to help working professionals and students make progress on their most important tasks: the Power Hour.

You’ll learn how to harness the power of a focused, uninterrupted hour to boost your productivity and move the needle on the things that are just, for some reason, not completing themselves. 😉 (I know, how dare they.)

I'll walk you through the 5 steps to create and execute a Power Hour, and by the end of the episode, you'll know how to integrate this powerful technique into your box of time management tools.

And in case you’re wondering — no, a Power Hour is not just when you sit down and work for 60 minutes. That’s just called … work. This is something different, and it might be just what you need to get unstuck.

🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned:

→ Episode 03 What’s an Admin Block and Why You Need One for Productivity 

→ Episode 05 Secrets of a Good Task Management System

→ Episode 10 February Q&A: Tips for Better Task Management and Focus

→ Episode 14 How to Use the Pomodoro Technique for School and Work

✏️ FREE DOWNLOADS:

→ Daily Timeblock Planner (pdf)

→ 📰 SIGN UP FOR MY AWESOME NEWSLETTER

• Get the transcription

  The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)

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  27 How to Get Things Done with a Power Hour

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  [00:00:00] Well, hello there my friends. This is episode 27 of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. And I am so happy that you're here. 

  I hope you know that when I'm recording these podcasts, I feel like I'm actually talking to you. And I know that might sound a little bananas, but I have spent almost two decades doing what I've been doing. And so when I close my eyes, I really do feel like I can picture who I'm talking to. 

  
  Anyways, I appreciate you. And I thank you very much for listening today. 

  This episode is going to be a tactical one. I want you to walk away today with a plan. With a clear how to. And that might mean that you listen to the episode all the way through, especially if you are walking and driving as I tend to listen to podcasts. 

  Or it might mean that you listen and you pause along the way to take notes. 

  Either way, I'm going to teach a clock based time management strategy that's perfect for the days where you are just [00:01:00] feeling the urge to crank through your to-do list, or maybe you have a project that you've been stalling on and you just feel like you need to bulldoze your way through to start making some progress on it. 

  So today we are talking about the power hour. 

  Yes. That's kind of exactly what it sounds like. 

  It is an hour where you power up and get it done. 

  And you might be wondering why I'm making a whole entire episode about this. Like isn't a power hour just sitting down and working for an hour? And no it's really not. There is a right way to do a power hour, and that is what you are going to learn today. 

  ​[00:02:00] 

  All right. 

  
  So there are essentially five steps to executing the ultimate power hour. 

  I'm going to explain each one in detail first and at the end of the episode, as I've been actually trying to do lately, I'm going to recap all five steps. 

  
  All right. So step one- we are jumping right in- is to find the time to do this power hour. 

  You are going to need 60 minutes of uninterrupted time. 

  And honestly, that's not usually something that just materializes on our schedules in the middle of the day. For many of us finding 60 minutes of uninterrupted time requires advance planning. So this is, you know, when you sit down and you open up your calendar and you find a 60-minute chunk of time during your day that is going to have the smallest chance of being [00:03:00] interrupted or hijacked by somebody who needs something? Okay. 

  
  So, for example, let's say that you go to an office job, maybe it's a nine-to-five job, like very typical- maybe planning a power hour at 9:00 AM is just not a good idea. Because I mean, I don't work for corporate and I don't have colleagues as I used to, and I used to teach in a school system, I used to work for corporate and, um, public education. And 9:00 AM would be the time when, you know, colleagues come bopping into the office or, you know, into the classroom and they check in and they say, how was your night? 

  
  Right? So 9:00 AM might not be the perfect time if you're trying to look for an uninterrupted block on your calendar, or if you drive to your office, maybe 9:00 AM is not great because of traffic. Right? And maybe your commute is something more unpredictable. And so planning something at 9:00 AM when you don't have [00:04:00] control over the events that are happening in the time meeting up to when you plan your power hour, then you're increasing the likelihood that your power hour won't start as planned. 

  You see what I'm saying? 

  So the idea, you know, find a time in the day that tends to be a bit more quiet or a time when you could actually maybe go someplace a little more isolated. If that's an option. So what I'm actually suggesting here is that in addition to finding the time to complete your power hour, you also give some thought. Into where this magic is going to happen. 

  If you're at work like at a office building, can you book a small conference from, for this so that nobody can come knocking? And looking for you. 

  If you're a student, can you hide away somewhere in a library, cubicle and not in like, you know, the center of your dorm or the student center? 

  The most important part of the power hour is finding right the actual hour. So we need to be [00:05:00] thoughtful about this step. 

  All right. Step two is to determine what you are going to do during this precious 60 minutes that you have just blocked off and are going to protect like gold. Right. 

  
  Obviously this depends on who you are and what you need to get done, but usually there are two approaches to a power hour. One option is that you can work 60 minutes straight through on a single task. That's one way to do it. Another option is that you can use that 60 minutes to bang out several tasks that are all of similar nature, right? 

  So maybe for 15 minutes, ha. Uh, writing tasks or maybe for 15-minute brainstorms, whatever it may be. 

  
  But the idea is that you have done the work you've done the brainstorm. And you have figured this out before you sit down for your power hour.

  Time management- I, I say this a lot on my podcast, but it is a real thing and it involves math and [00:06:00] strategy and intention and execution. And so if you're really willing to give this power hour a try, because you feel like your time management has been maybe a little wonky, then you have got to go all the way in on this. 

  And that means I want you to write down exactly what you plan to work on. 

  
  All right. 

  
  So I do have a few tips to help you get started on figuring out what the heck you're going to do with this power hour. And a good place to start is with your task management system. Hopefully you have one. 

  If you don't, then you need to go back and listen to episode five. Which is secrets of a good task management system. I also talk about task management in episode 10 as well. I believe that was one of the Q and a episodes. The listener had asked. Okay. All of the links to everything that I mentioned today will be in the show notes. 

  If you are listening to this on a podcast app, if you are watching this video on the Learn and Work Smarter YouTube channel then they will be linked in the description box. 

  But assuming you have some kind of task [00:07:00] management system, even if it's a list that you keep on paper, just look at your upcoming projects. 

  Look at your upcoming assignments, if you're a student. 

  Look at the things that you haven't been able to get to for whatever reason. So, you know, you keep like writing them down over and over again each day, thinking that like today is going to be the day I get this done. Right. 

  Or what about that thing that you've been procrastinating on for weeks? You know, you have to start that report and you have to start that book analysis. You need to start preparing for the quarterly meeting. Whatever the case may be. You're looking for anywhere from, let's say one to four tasks that are good candidates to be completed in a power hour when you're not nailing the tasks down right now, you're just brainstorming. As I said, this could be a singular task that you dedicate all 60 minutes to, or it could be multiple tasks that are somewhat similar in nature. 

  The reason I say that they should be similar in nature is your 60 minutes during this power hour is so precious. 

  
  And I don't want there to be any [00:08:00] transition time between. Tasks. So if you do, if you choose one task, that's like a writing task at your computer and you say, okay, well, I'm going to do that for 30 minutes and I'm going to do this other task that's in this other location that is actually not at the computer. 

  
  And maybe it's like talking to somebody for 30 minutes. Well that involves some sort of transition time. And then you're wasting your 60 minutes. The whole entire point of a power hour, is it, you are not budging from what you are working on for that 60 minutes. So if you're going to do multiple tasks, I want them to be similar in nature so that you can smoothly go from one to another personally. 

  And if you're like Katie, I don't know whether to do one task or multiple tasks. Just tell me what to do! Then I'm going to say, pick one task. And do it for the whole 60 minutes. That's usually the most effective and efficient way to do a power hour and to finish that power hour feeling like you [00:09:00] genuinely made some good progress on it. 

  
  You can use power hours outside the context of work. 

  
  I mean, obviously this is the Learn Work Smarter podcast, so the context that I tend to remain inside of are work and school, but we can use power hours for, um, decluttering our closets or for cleaning our home. I do that all the time. 

  Set a timer for 60 minutes and just like. Don't stop cleaning. Right for that 60 minutes. 

  
  And in that case, I might go from room to room to room. So like multiple rooms that could be the equivalent of sort of multiple tasks, but they're all tasks that are similar in nature. They're all cleaning tasks. Does that make sense? 

  Um, anyway. Another thing that I want to bring up is that my very first episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, episode number one, it's called what is an admin block and why you need one. 

  If you have listened to that episode, that means you're an OG. 

  
  And that is awesome. If you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it. You might be thinking [00:10:00] that this power hour strategy sounds a lot like an admin block. But it is not right. Hear me out. In admin block is when you dedicate a period of time. And now. It could be 60 minutes to bang out all of those pesky administration tasks that sort of. You know, like punctuate our day and interrupt our focus and our productivity, things like email and phone calls and processing paperwork. 

  But a power hour is a dedicated 60 minutes where you work intensely on something that is going to move the needle. Usually these tasks are cognitively demanding and they are somewhat intense. 

  And truth be told that's usually why we procrastinate on these tasks. Just because the anticipation of the psychological pain makes us just avoid the task altogether. If there's been something like that, that you've been avoiding try a power hour.

  
  At the end of this step two, which [00:11:00] is the step we're on, you should have a list of anywhere between one to four tasks that you think could fit into 60 minutes. 

  Now,, I don't want you to use any wishful thinking here. I know there are a ton of tasks that. We wish would fit into 60 minutes. Okay. But that's not what we're doing. You've got to think of tasks that you can either complete, like from start to finish in 60 minutes or that you can work on for 60 minutes straight and not complete the task, but it would be okay to stop sort of mid task after 60 minutes are up. 

  So, for example, if you're a student and you had to write an essay, you could absolutely write for 60 minutes and then stop. 

  If you're making a presentation for work, you could work on your slides for 60 minutes and then you could stop. These are tasks that you can stop at a certain point before they're complete. 

  
  And it won't sort of like mess up your train of thought or your progress. 

  All right. Moving on to step three, which is to choose a task [00:12:00] or tasks from your list and to gather any materials you're going to need for those tasks. 

  So in the previous step, I suggested listing one to four tasks. This was more of like the brainstorm, but this is the step where you look at your list and you say, okay, am I doing one? 

  Am I doing three? Am I doing four? You are finalizing the thing that you're going to be doing during the power hour. 

  
  You might be thinking, okay, well, um, I want to do these three tasks, but then you sit down and you try to do the math for like a minute. And you're like, oh wait, like, I can only fit two of these into a power hour. 

  And this third task is going to require me to transition too much. Okay. You're thinking about. How to prioritize and fit the brainstorm tasks into the actual list of the thing that you're going to do. Now, just a little caveat. If in step two, you already knew right off the bat. You're like I have this one task and I am going to work on this one task. 

  I already know what it is. I don't need to brainstorm. Well, then step three. You're not really [00:13:00] choosing from your list because your list had one item. It was. It's already the chosen one. All right. 

  So then the second part of step three, which we're on right now, which is gather your materials, that's the part that's going to be relevant for you. 

  Okay. So this is where we gather the materials that you need so you're completely ready before you sit down to do your work. 

  So technically, I guess you can break this step into two steps if you want. 

  So you can finalize the tasks they're going to complete during your power hour, maybe like on one day, and then closer to the day, you're actually going to have your power hour, you can make sure that you have gathered and consolidated all of the materials that you need. 

  So if you're thinking about doing a power hour on Friday, And it's Tuesday, you can gather all your materials that say like on Thursday or Friday morning, right. But let's say it's Tuesday morning and you've just listened to this podcast and you want to have a power hour. Tuesday afternoon. 

  
  Well, you're going to need to get on it and make sure that you've gotten your [00:14:00] materials. Um, before your scheduled you know, hour or whatever. Does that make sense? 

  The last thing that you want to do is sit down to your power hour and realize that you don't have what you need. 

  From the minute the clock starts ticking you need to be working, not preparing to work. 

  
  And then that actually brings us to step four, which is to set the timer for 60 minutes. Seriously, you have to set a timer. 

  
  If you're not using a timer for your power hour, you're not doing a power hour. And you're removing the, honestly say the singular element that makes this strategy work so well. 

  
  When we give ourselves a constraint, like 60 minutes, we create a sense of urgency. And if you're someone with ADHD, you're probably familiar with the phenomenon of getting this massive boost of motivation in the 11th hour, the night before something is, do you know what I'm talking about? 

  Right. Why? Because urgency is one of the two [00:15:00] primary ingredients to motivation. And we can't have urgency without time. So set a timer for 60 minutes and get to work. 

  And that is actually step five, right? We've just hit step five real fast, which is to work on your task for 60 minutes without stopping. If you are worried at this point about getting distracted during the 60 minutes and that's on you to optimize their environment so there are no distractions. 

  Put your phone in another room. If you were thinking about using the timer on your phone. Don't use the timer on your computer. 

  Use an analog clock. If you're working from home, use the microwave clock. We've got to optimize our environments for success. 

  And for most of us, the number one way to do that is to get the darn phone out of our darn line of vision. 

  
  Alright. Um, if you are easily distracted by auditory [00:16:00] stimulation then use noise, canceling headphones or earplugs, I love earplugs. 

  
  Tell your people that you're unavailable, tell your people that you're in a meeting, remove everything from your workspace that's unrelated to the task that you're doing. Make sure that you are fed and have gone to the bathroom and it had enough water. 

  
  Right. You don't want all these sort of nagging physical cues, like hunger and thirst interrupting you. Doing everything we can to manage distractions before we start working is literally jobbing 101. Right? 

  If you follow any of my study advice on schoolhabits.com or even on some of my podcast episodes here or maybe you're enrolled in my online course, schoolhabits university, you know that I encourage students to limit study sessions to somewhere around 45 to 60 minutes, max. 

  In reality, my most common advice is to have [00:17:00] study sessions that are 25 to 45 minutes. Okay. And I'm going somewhere with this. And you're like, wait, where did she just, she just went from distractions to timing. Hold on. 

  Um, there's another thing: you might also be familiar with the Pomodoro technique. That is what I talk about in episode 14. And also in some of my YouTube videos on my schoolhabits YouTube channel.

  The Pomodoro technique is a strategy where you work for 25 minutes and then you take a five-minute break and then you work for another 25 minutes and you take another five-minute break and you repeat that cycle. Uh, until your work is done. And when I talk about the Pomodoro technique and the benefit of those short, you know, 25-minute sessions, there really is a scientific reason why short frequent study sessions are better for learning. 

  Okay. But the power hour here, it's not for studying. All right. It's for doing actual work. And I'm explaining this because if you're familiar with my study advice or the Pomodoro technique, I don't want [00:18:00] you to think that I'm contradicting myself here. 

  The difference is that I recommend shorter study sessions when we are studying because of cognitive cognitive processes that are involved in knowledge acquisition. 

  All right. But that doesn't apply here when we're just working. Yes, you can use the Pomodoro technique for work as well. And it's wonderful and it's effective, but the power hour is a time management tool that's more, I'd say like a, like a sprint versus the Pomodoro technique, which is more like a marathon because you can essentially do, you know, a 25 minute study sessions indefinitely, if you keep taking those five minute breaks in between. 

  But you wouldn't not stack multiple power hours together. That would just be way too much. 

  
  I mean, I suppose you could do, you know, a power hour, one in the morning and one in the evening, and if you have like a big break in between, but as I said, the power hours are best left for [00:19:00] cognitively demanding tasks. And after you give 60 minutes of intense thick, juicy thinking and mental work, then you're probably not going to want to do another power hour now. 

  
  I did mention earlier in the episode, the idea of using a power hour for just other sort of nagging tasks that you haven't -I don't know that you've been procrastinating on or just that, you know, you have to get done at some point something like cleaning the house. And I suppose you could clean for an hour and then go for a walk. Do something else. 

  And then a few hours later set the timer again and do another power hour of cleaning your house. You could do something like that, but that stuff's not cognitively demanding. Does that make sense?

  Okay. Now I have already explained a little bit about why the power hour works so well. And that's partly because having a time limit on what we're doing adds that urgency, right? 

  Which increases our motivation for doing the thing.

  But also the power hour is a great time management [00:20:00] strategy because it counters Parkinson's law. 

  Parkinson's law essentially says that a task expands to fit the amount of time we allot to it. Google it. So in other words, if we give ourselves a week to do something, it's going to take us a week to do it. 

  If we give ourselves three hours to do something, it's going to take three hours to do it. 

  So by limiting the time we have to complete a task, limiting ourselves to 60 minutes, we work faster and more efficiently, which takes Parkinson's law down at the knees, if that makes sense? 

  Here is the recap of the five steps to planning a power hour. 

  I promised this at the beginning of the episode, I want to get in the habit of recapping. 

  
  Number one block out 60 minutes of uninterrupted time. 

  Two: brainstorm tasks that you need to, or want to complete. Remember, this is just, you know, generating your list. 

  Number three, from your list, you've got to narrow down which task or tasks you will complete in your power hour. And you'll [00:21:00] gather as many materials as you need to get those tasks done. 

  
  Step four, set a timer for 60 minutes. 

  And step five: work without distractions for the full 60 minutes. Right. There we have it, my friends, how to do a power hour and why you should. 

  I hope you found this episode helpful. If you know anybody who would find it helpful too please share it with them. If you're listening to this in a podcast app, there's a little share button that looks like an arrow. If you are watching this on YouTube, there's also a share button below the video. 

  Gestures like that make all of the difference to spreading the word and getting my podcast in front of more people who get benefit from the content. 

  I hope you have a beautiful day. And as always, never stop learning.