The Stoic 60-Minute Power Hour Routine

One of the prompts in my morning writing is simple: what three things will make up my power hour? It is the question that decides whether a day actually moves forward.

In this short one I explain what a power hour is and how I use it to get real work done while looking after a two-year-old half the week and running several business projects on the side. If you are short on time and tired of feeling scattered, give it a listen.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hello, my fellow Stoics. I'd like to address today a question that I got through email after my latest post, My Insanely Productive Stoic Morning Routine. I'll provide a link to that post in the description. In that post, I share the prompts that I use on a daily basis to help me navigate the hardships, the obstacles that come up throughout the day, but also get in touch with gratitude and become more productive because as Stoics we want to become productive. We want to get stuff done, we want to make an impact, we want to improve our inner world, our inner citadel, and our outer one. To cultivate wise action. Keyword action. So the question was, what is the power hour? Because in the notion template that I provide, I had a prompt that said, What three things will make up my power hour today? So I'm a dad. I care for my two-year-old in a few months. My my toddler, my little son. And yeah, I I care for him multiple days a week, you know, and it's and it's and it's a difficult, challenging task. I care for him on my own, twelve 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 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 you have to constantly practice these stoic virtues so that you can make it through the day and uh be the best parent that you can be. There are many examples like this, like running a business, and just 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. So it comes back to this productivity principle called batching. All right. 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. Uh obviously, if you're if you're if you have to go to work, you 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, I 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. Uh, some days it's learn video editing. So 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 focused around doing certain types of meditations. Um, 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 uh was first uh I first stumbled on in Tim Ferriss's book, The Four-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., 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 uh that's what I'm actually gonna do after this episode. So yeah, I'll have more to say soon, but uh the idea of a power hour is something you can start using today. You can do it a power 30 minutes. Obviously, it doesn't have the same ring to it, but like 10 minute, 10 minute, 10 minute. Um, 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, uh, your stoic active recall and space repetition to really get the principles down. Uh, if you're struggling to do the reflections you need to do, then yeah, include that in the in the power hour. And what I say in in the article uh on the insanely productive stoic morning routine, and I love this frame, is imagine an A-B test, which means like a clone of you, essentially living the exact same life, but the clone of you was doing this power hour every day for a year, 365 days a year, whereas the 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, message me, leave me a comment. I'm always happy to respond and help out. And uh I'll speak to you soon, fate permitting.