This is a personal log entry for my 4-Hour Workday challenge. You can also keep me honest by tracking my current activity page.
Summer is officially over, and today is already the halfway point of my 4-Hour Workday challenge (which I'm only doing on actual workdays, for obvious reasons). It's already been a wild ride - here's the recap...
It can be done.
When I started 30GO30, my core idea was to devote 30 minutes per day for 30 days to key projects, especially the ones I've been putting off. For this challenge, I'm basically doing 8 simultaneous 30GO30 challenges, when you stop to think about it.
So, I tried not to stop to think about it. So far, that blissful ignorance strategy is working pretty well. I only had one day where I fell short (7 blocks), and I had a couple of 9-block days. I'm feeling good about it, because my schedule is bizarre right now. We have 2 (alternating) daytime nannies for our 14-month-old, and every day is a bit different.
My days have closure.
I'm really bad about not separating personal and work life, and that's only made worse by being a one-man shop and working from home. In my head, there's always something left undone, and it's not a healthy way to live.
Knowing that I finished 8 focused blocks of works leaves me feeling like I did what I had to do. Every client got time, critical personal and family projects got time, and I know that there were at least 4 hours where I wasn't screwing around on Facebook and Twitter. It's going to take some adjustment, but I'm already ending the day feeling like I got things done.
I'm getting more done.
At the beginning of this challenge, some people seemed to think that I was going to work 20 hours a week and then go sip margaritas or something. The point of the challenge isn't to work less – it's to work better.
What's amazing is that, especially at first, 4 hours of truly uninterrupted work often takes more than 8 hours. It can be tough to find those windows and even tougher to start the clock and make yourself shut out the distractions.
I'm not just ending the day with more closure – I'm ending the day with more work done. Anyone can sit in a chair for 8 (or 10) hours and pretend to work, and most people do.
Focus, as always, is key.
This lesson started long before the last 3 weeks, but when I focus on projects for 30 minutes at a time and shut out the noise, I can really see the difference. It doesn't matter whether it's writing, reading, number-crunching, or even cleaning – multi-tasking is a myth. Sure, you can make your brain and body do 2 things at once, but you're rarely doing either of them well.
So, 3 more weeks to go. If anyone's still participating or has an update on one of their own 30-day challenges, chime in in the comments.
