Anything worthwhile needs 8 hours of continuous work..

There are many types of work that may take from a few minutes to a few hours, but valuable work needs time. Time needs to be booked without interruption for long periods. To be able to make progress on all my activities including work, businesses, blog and family, I use several techniques to block and reserve my time and work on my most valuable goals. Here are three tips on how you can create blocks of time that will make every day of your life worthwhile.

1. Do something valuable early in the morning

I prefer to do most of my writing early in the morning 630-730. I am most refreshed during that time and I do like the fact that it is unlikely that anyone would interrupt me. Interruptions are a killer for creativity and any productive work. I also like to read for half an hour before that if I wake up earlier. So reading time would be 6-630.

Try it yourself, wake up early, start half an hour earlier than the time you currently wake up at. Work on something you consider valuable to your life. Work on your most important goal or most enjoyable one. The most important thing is that you work and you enjoy it – first thing in the morning.

I produce more in an early morning hour with no interruptions and no noise than any other hour during the day.

2. Do things in 20-minute blocks during the day

During the day, to keep your energy up, you need to make sure it never goes down. Let me explain, if you take many breaks during the day, it will allow you to keep your energy up even if you keep working all day long. This system consists of the following steps:

a. Work for 20 minutes at a time
b. Take a 5 minute break every 20 minutes
c. After 4 blocks of 20 minutes take a 15 minute break
d. Plan your next 2 hours in the remaining 5 minutes.

The idea behind this technique is to stay alert by taking 5 minute breaks every 20 minutes of work. Once the body becomes accustomed to working hard on short bursts of time, it becomes more efficient. Most likely you will finish the 20 minutes and you won’t feel that you need to take the break. However, it is critical that you take those 5 minutes off. This will ensure that your energy never “goes down” to the point where it is simply too hard to get it back up.

Another good way to separate the morning and the afte
oon sessions is to get a 5 minute power nap. This will boost your energy and will make you feel you just started another day – if you can manage it and find a place to sleep in the middle of the day – don’t get caught!

I usually work 6 am - 8 pm every day. It took me years to reach this level of productivity and I don’t think I can manage without taking all of those breaks, getting my power nap (when I can) and working in short 20-minute blocks of time.

3. Schedule time off and make something fabulous in 8-12 hour blocks of 4 hours each.

To produce anything of value, you need time - uninterrupted, focused time. The longer you work on something the more value it will have. Simply, the longer you work on something without interruption and without having to shift gears on to something else, the better the final output will be.

Let me tell you why. It takes hours of creative thought to elevate your thinking process to new grounds. You start working by building your thought pattern and using everything you know up until that moment. This may take a block of 2-4 hours, let’s call it the warm up stage.

After that, you start developing new thoughts and patterns that you didn’t think about before. These are new insights or “aha’s”. These new insights give you motivation and make you grow as a person. Thinking about these aha’s, improving on them, cleaning them, may take another 2-4 hours. Let’s call this the “creativity stage”.

Finally you drive those aha’s to make a plan of action and do the work required to implement them. The final plan of action is critical – because without it, your aha’s may slip forever as it is less productive to implement a new idea when the warm up stage and the creativity stage have passed. If you write the idea on a piece of paper and decide to come back to it another day, when you see it, you might not even recognize it. It loses value and loses the value it had simply because you don’t remember all the thinking “the warm up” and the “creativity” stages that have produced that aha.

So in 3 blocks of 2-4 hours, you can create something fabulous make sure you reach the third stage “productivity” to be able to make a difference.

Conclusion:

To produce anything of value, start early and work on your most valuable and enjoyable goal; Use the 20-minute work/5-minute break blocks of time to keep alert and refreshed and continue working all day without feeling tired. If you have something challenging/creative to do, schedule 8 - 12 hours of continuous work (going through the warm-up/creativity/productivity stages) and don’t leave the scene of an idea until you have a clear plan of action to implement what you have created in your mind.

I hope you have enjoyed this post. This is how I work most of the time, and it works for me. Let me know how you manage your time by commenting below for the benefit of all. Thanks.