The power hour

BY COLLEEN LINDBERG

I was at a retreat and the speaker brought forth a concept that I wanted to share with you. It’s called the five-minute frenzy. It was based around a concept of using time and focused effort in a specific time period to accomplish something. How many times in your day do you say to yourself “Oh I need to do that” “Or I will do that later on” or my favorite “Oh shoot I forgot to do that”. We then miss opportunities, create more stress and overall are less productive because we are trying to remember so much. Let’s chat about how you can start to set yourself up to shift this.

So, the basis of the power hour or five-minute frenzy is picking those tasks that you delay on, maybe it’s your bookkeeping, doing the dishes, cleaning up the dog poop in the yard and you know I could mention a million different things. Then you do the tasks in a timed fashion as fast as you can. So, the speaker gave this example of when he used to break for lunch, and he would eat these burritos. The burritos would take five minutes to cook, 2.5 minutes on each side. Naturally during the time the burrito was in the microwave he would do a five-minute frenzy on tasks he was procrastinating on. Whether it was laundry, dishes or cleaning the bathroom. He would do as much as he could in five minutes. It then became a game and he managed to get those little tasks done in some increments of time in his day instead of allotting all this time to them later on. He shifted his procrastination on those tasks and made them fun.

So, where in your life are you procrastinating? What tasks could you create a power hour for. One solid hour of hashing out something. For me this week it’s filing paperwork. I am committing to nailing that out because it’s an eye sore. I find myself always saying “I will get to it” and so on with all the things I say to try and get it done. But in reality, it’s just not that urgent for me, although it will help me be more organized and I will save time in the long run.

Energy leaks happen when we have so much going on. We are trying to remember to do this and that and as you know you have a lot to do. These small tasks (that most likely you don’t like to do anyways) can be cleared up in a fun way and it will allow you to have more brain space. Just clearing up some things will allow you more clarity and to be more productive. It’s just trying to do that is the challenge. If you are an entrepreneur, you know what I am talking about. So how can you do the power hour or the five-minute frenzy in your business tasks? You could even do this with your social media postings or making follow up calls. Focused time on anything yields results. So. what do you want to accomplish this week? Make this fun. Laugh at yourself, be proud of the progress and most of all… keep loving life!