Stoic Power Hour: Focus And Finish Three Important Tasks

A practical talk for people who keep postponing several small but meaningful tasks. Learn how to build a Stoic Power Hour by choosing three 20-minute actions, preparing the materials in advance and completing them in one focused block. Use it for meditation, reading, study, admin or any group of tasks that keeps slipping through the day. Revisit whenever your routine becomes scattered, then schedule your next Power Hour before you leave.

Transcript

Hello my fellow Stoics. So I'm a dad, I care for my two-year-old and a few months, My toddler, My little son and yeah I care for him multiple days a week you know and it's a difficult challenging task. I care for him on my own 12 hours a day for about three, Four, Sometimes five days a week and the only break I get during this time is when he has a one-hour nap. He gets a one-hour nap. So looking after children is a great Stoic practice in itself because you have to have patience and tolerance and kindness and discipline. You have to stay on a routine and and yeah you you have to constantly practice these Stoic virtues so that you can make it through the day and be the best parent that you can be. There are many examples like this like running a business and being in any kind of relationship or having any kind of responsibility is a great opportunity to practice Stoicism. I encourage you to take on responsibility so that you can practice it. Very difficult to really practice Stoicism if you have no responsibilities in life. So during this one-hour nap that my son has I want to use this time as productively as possible. So what is productivity to me? Well essentially productivity is getting things done that help me take care of myself but also allow me to rest easy. You know that feeling of like okay I've done that thing, That dragon has been slayed, The thing that I've been putting off is now done, The thing that I wanted to learn or look at is done. It comes back to this productivity principle called batching. If I give you three 20-minute tasks to do throughout the day you're likely going to procrastinate between them. So if I tell you like meditate for 20 minutes, Read Stoicism for 20 minutes and take notes on this new skill that you want to learn for 20 minutes, You'll probably wake up, Think you have to meditate, Procrastinate for a while. Obviously if you have to go to work, You know you have opportunities throughout the day to do a little bit of meditation that you'll just put off because there's other things to do. Eventually you'll do it and then you'll have like okay I've done that now I've got this other 20-minute thing to do and then you'll eventually do that and then maybe you won't even do the third because you're too tired by the end of the day. So those three 20-minute tasks took you multiple hours overall to get done. Lots of thought went into them, When you'll do it, When you won't do it, How you'll feel about it and it's just stretching these things out unnecessarily. So the power hour is this idea of batching where you just batch smaller tasks together. Generally there are like two main groups of tasks that we have. There's deep work, So this would be like a block of a few hours, Minimum of two hours of deep work that you want to do and that ideally you want to get into flow state and forget everything and have no distractions and just get really into this deep work task. That would be something like writing, Creativity, Anything really to do with giving your all to one thing. But then you have these like smaller tasks right so like I want to read for 20 minutes, Want to meditate for 20 minutes, I want to do this thing for 20 minutes and it's way better to actually put them all together because then in one hour, Just one hour, You've got three very high leverage things done for the day. So every day I change what consists of my power hour. Some days it's learn video editing, That's something that I want to learn now. Other days it's study productivity principles. Other days it's focused around looking at my flashcards. Other days it's focused around doing certain types of meditations and there's three different things that go into my power hour and it's just bang bang bang, One after the other, No thinking. And the idea is that you have the resources and you have the setup there so there's no reason for you to do anything else. This idea was first, I first stumbled on in Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Work Week and it comes down to this principle of if you, For example, Like if I want to record a podcast like this, I could do one a week in which case I have to set everything up, Make sure that there's no distractions in the house, Make sure that my microphone is out, Make sure everything's set up, Go through all that effort, Then do a 10, 20, 30 minute podcast and then close it, Edit it, Upload it, Etc. And I could do this every week or while everything is set up here now, While my microphone is set up here, My laptop is set up here, I could do three short podcasts and then release them one week at a time. So that's what I'm actually going to do after this episode. So yeah, I'll have more to say soon but the idea of a power hour is something you can start using today. You can do a power 30 minutes. Obviously it doesn't have the same ring to it but like 10 minute, 10 minute, 10 minute or just like one hour, Block it in your calendar, Three times 20 minute actions. I'd encourage you to make it about Stoicism because that's what we're doing here. If you don't already do Stoic practices, Like if you have your own Stoic thing done and covered, Then yeah, Sure, Do whatever you like in the 20 minutes. But if you're struggling to get your Stoic meditations in, Your Stoic reading, Your Stoic active recall and space repetition to really get the principles down, If you're struggling to do the reflections you need to do, Then yeah, Include that in the power hour. And I love this frame is imagine AB test, Which means like a clone of you essentially living the exact same life, But the clone of you is doing this power hour every day for a year, 365 days a year. Whereas version of you that is you right now wasn't, Was instead scrolling Facebook for that one hour. What opportunities, Gifts, And just like amazing situations would you bring into your life if you were the clone that was doing this power hour every day versus the you that is just scrolling and wasting one of your 16 waking hours a day doing pretty much nothing. So yeah, Thanks for listening. Give it a try as always. Leave me a comment. I'm always happy to respond and help out. And I'll speak to you soon. Fate permitting.

Reviews

Very interesting! I’m going to try this and one chunk of my hour will be to learn more about stoicism. Thank you, Jon