One Hour a Week is All You Need to Get More Stuff Done
It's a secret of adulthood: Nothing is more exhausting than a task you never start. I've known this for a long time, but nevertheless had managed to accumulate a lengthy list of small, mildly unpleasant tasks that I kept putting off -- for months, sometimes years. Granted, these projects weren't urgent (which was why they didn't get done), but they weighed on me, made me feel overwhelmed, filled my brain with I need to… and Don't forget…! I had to fix the problem, because it was making me crazy.
I decided to come up with a habit that would help me cross those items off my list. But what? How could a single habit cover a bunch of nonrecurring, unrelated to-do's? Then I hit upon an idea. Once a week, for one hour, I'd steadily work on nagging chores. An hour felt like enough time to get stuff done, but not too long.
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During this hour, I'd tackle only tasks with no deadline, no accountability, and no pressure -- because these were the things I kept ignoring. That's another Secret of Adulthood: A chore that can be done anytime is often done at no time.
I considered calling my new idea my "To-Do List Time." Then I remembered a term from psychology, the "fluency heuristic," which means that an idea seems more valuable if it's easy to say. For instance, "Haste makes waste" is more compelling than "Hurrying leads to errors." With that in mind, I named my new habit "Power Hour."
I started by making a list of tasks. That was almost fun, because I get a weird satisfaction from adding items to my to-do list. I couldn't use my Power Hour for planning my daughter's birthday party or for buying plane tickets (for some reason, I loathe buying plane tickets) because those chores have deadlines -- so I'd ultimately get to them, like it or not. And I couldn't use my Power Hour for paying bills or for answering e-mails, because I'd developed different habits to get repetitive chores done. Power Hour was my chance to tackle one-time tasks that were sapping my energy and that I could easily postpone indefinitely. A few things on my list:
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1. Make a photo album of our summer vacation
2. Use up store credits
3. Donate books to Housing Works
4. Move daughter's pretend kitchen
5. Round up and recycle batteries and devices
I decided to ignore all of those for my first Power Hour and tackle my long-neglected paper shredder problem instead. When I bought a shredder, it broke right away, which was discouraging. I got a replacement, but then I let it sit in the corner for months. I couldn't face reading the directions or figuring out how to plug it into the inaccessible wall socket. In the meantime, I'd collected a gigantic pile of mail to be shredded. The unused shredder bugged me, the pile of mail bugged me, and the trivial matter of when I'd finally get around to shredding the stuff was taking up way too much room in my head.
Power Hour, I thought grimly that first Saturday afternoon. I sat on the floor, figured out how to plug in the shredder, and -- it actually worked. Not so bad after all.
"Hey, Eliza! Want to help me shred?" I called to my daughter.
She came running. "Yes! I love shredding!" By the end of the hour, we had a garbage bag full of scraps. The next day, when something shred-worthy came in the mail, I marched straight to the shredder and got rid of it right away. Victory!
People often overestimate what they can accomplish in the short term (in an afternoon or a week), and under estimate what they can accomplish over the long term if they work consistently. But the more experienced with Power Hour I got, the more I noticed that tasks usually didn't take as long as I'd expected them to. For example, I wrote an e-mail I'd been putting off for six months because it required me to describe a complicated change to my website. As it turned out, I whipped it off in 45 seconds.
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Usually, I stick with one task per Power Hour. If I'm not done after an hour, I stop and continue the next week. But writing that dreaded e-mail happened so fast, I did another. Hitting Send gave me a surge of energy and cheer completely disproportionate to the accomplishment, but it felt so good to cross it off my list. A friend once told me, "I finally cleared out my fridge, and now I feel like I can switch careers." I knew what she meant. I was the only one who cared that I'd finally donated my daughters' outgrown clothes, but that didn't matter: Doing those things made a difference to me.
My friends like the idea, too. Recently, I helped one clear her closet (a Power Hour for her). She was so thrilled with the results that when she had a dinner party a few weeks later, she led her guests into the bedroom to admire the glorious organization. An hour a week is a small price to pay for that kind of satisfaction, don't you think?
- By Gretchen Rubin
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