# 10 lunch and learn: How to get three hours work done in just one

What it is

The Power Hour – a fabulous technique to super-charge your efficiency, awesome for the time-challenged!

Why it works

It gets you doing your most valuable work at the best time for your brain. So you get the important stuff done in much less time.

How you do it

The how-to-do it is easy; the doing of it less so, until you get into the habit.

1. You start by finding the time of the day when your brain is on fire. My guess is that you know when your peak time is. Some of us are morning folk, others are evening types, some of us are 3 am-ers. It doesn’t matter what anyone else’s time is, this is about working with our own natural inclination.
2. Then you arrange your day so that you can spend at least one hour during your ‘on-fire’ time working on the most valuable stuff in your business.

The tricky thing for most of us is that we are running our businesses around other commitments, and those commitments have a tendency to fall right into our ‘on-fire’ time.

I know this personally. I’m a morning person. Ideally I would wake at 6am and head straight to my computer for 3 hours of writing. Pre-kids that’s what I did. I was so efficient that I could accomplish stuff in those three hours that would easily take me 7 or 8 hours if I started later in the day.

But now I have 4 children; 3 are at school and one’s a toddler. Mornings start at 5:15 when the youngest wakes and I don’t get a moment to think about work until after the school run at 9 am.

I’m also in the middle of a big writing project so could really use the on-fire time.

A couple of months ago I read a few articles about authors who got up at strange times of the night to write. It planted a seed. Could I get up at 4 am and write for an hour?

I’m neither a masochist nor a complete nutter so it was a big ask.

Would the one hour at 4am be productive enough to make it worth the pain of getting up at 4am? (Just between you and I, I also asked myself whether I’d be able to sneak in a Nanna-Nap later in the day!)

I decided to give it a go.

Two months later I can say that while it was painful at the start I quickly got into the 4am habit. It’s a bit weird and I am desperately hungry at unusual times, but that one hour equates to the output of about three hours later in the day. The maths makes sense to me.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m certainly not advocating early mornings. But I am carrying the banner for finding your on-fire time  and redesigning your day so that you get to do one hour -yep, just one hour – during the on-fire time.

Do you think you can do that?

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