CORE HOURS - how to change the world in 2 hours a day
✔️Productivity,⭐️Featured
You’re a busy professional. You are a founder, a business owner, a manager or a team leader and you are great at your job. You’re doing so well in fact, that you feel like your workweek is totally slammed. This is becoming frustrating because apart from managing, delegating and leading, you also need time for focused work. Whenever you want to develop this new idea that’s been bugging you… there’s simply no time to sit down and work on it. I’ve been struggling with a similar problem as the CEO of Nozbe. However, as a productivity nut I’ve been digging through many time management books in an effort to find a solution for this… and I think I’ve got it. I call it CORE HOURS and if you also need help finding time to do your best creative work, here’s how I do it:
- CORE HOURS in one sentence
- 1 idea per week
- 2 hours of focused work per day
- From Monday to Thursday - each day I work 2 hours… at the same(ish) time
- On Friday I review the work and decide what’s next
- CORE HOURS = work on 1 idea for 2 hours per day and change the world!
- PS. Which books inspired me to create the CORE HOURS technique?
CORE HOURS in one sentence
CORE HOURS means blocking 2 hours at the same time of the day from Monday to Thursday, to work on 1 idea or concept per week.
That’s it. That’s the magic. 1 new idea. 2 hours per day. 4 days a week. Same time of day. Blocked in your calendar so nobody or nothing can disturb you. It guarantees you 8 hours per week of focused time for your most important ideas. I know it sounds simple, but I promise you, it will change your life.
Since I implemented CORE HOURS I’ve been having the most productive weeks of my life. I’ve been perfecting this concept for the last 5 years and all of its pieces are deliberate and make it super effective. Let me explain.
1 idea per week
Why only 1 idea per week? It’s because ideas need time and creative thinking. And if you work on an idea quickly, you will never truly go deep enough to understand it, study it and analyze its consequences. That’s why I choose only 1 idea to work on for each week. Every Friday as I do my weekly review I look at my CORE HOURS project with all my ideas listed and decide on the one that excites me the most or is most urgent for my business. I schedule it for next week’s CORE HOURS session.
When choosing this idea to work on I find it helpful to ask the focusing question from the book “One Thing”: What’s the 1 thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
2 hours of focused work per day
Over my 18-year career of running Nozbe I’ve read dozens of productivity books and I’ve tested countless ideas that were supposed to help me work better. Time and time again I’ve been proven right that there’s something like a 2 hour rule.
This means that in order to be able to work on something that requires deep thinking, I needed to block 2 hours of uninterrupted time. 120 minutes later I’d have either solved a problem or analyzed it enough so that it could be further developed later.
Why 2 hours? I discovered several reasons for it:
- 2 hours is long enough to really dive deep into a subject and truly focus on it and find the clue of the issue.
- 2 hour block is also short enough that if I put it in my calendar, usually nobody will need any type of urgent feedback from me. For most of the things, people can wait 2 hours.
- 2 hours take the pressure off me to find a solution quickly, as even if for a particular problem I need half an hour to warm up, I still have one hour and a half to work on it.
- 2 hours at once is usually the most I can stay focused on a task. If it’s more than that, very often I start feeling exhausted and need a change of pace or a switch to lighter tasks.
That’s why a 2-hour time block is my sweet spot for focused, deep work.
From Monday to Thursday - each day I work 2 hours… at the same(ish) time
The key to effortless execution is reducing the number of decisions to minimum. I’ve decided already I’m going to be working on 1 idea per week, 2 hours a day and now I know it’s going to happen for 4 days straight, from Monday to Thursday. Great, now comes the most difficult part - I’m trying to also decide upfront to work on it at the same time of day.
That’s right, I’ve found out that I’m most successful at working like this if the 2-hour block is at the same time of day. I’ve discovered that after my early meetings between 9-11 I’m ready to tackle my most demanding tasks, so I block off the next time slot of 11am to 1pm (11-13) so that I can work on my CORE HOURS idea.
At 11am my mobile phone goes to “do not disturb”, a smart light bulb lights up automatically in my home office and it’s a cue for me to pick up my CORE HOURS idea, analyze where I left it off yesterday and continue developing it. For this to work, I also have to be pretty strict and not schedule any meetings at that time.
After I’ve finished a 2-hour block of focused work, I write up my findings and let my mind do the magic. Subconsciously I’m still working on the problem, but I’m not actively thinking about it. I’m kind of sleeping on it.
Very often when I came back next day to my idea I have a fresh perspective and additional insights as to how to solve whatever I was working on. This time gap of a day is intentional and gives me a new kind of energy to get back to whatever I was working on. To attack the problem from a new angle.
That’s why the point of CORE HOURS is not to work on an idea for 8 hours straight, because this would be exhausting and would not bring the results I’m looking for. It’s to work for 8 hours per week but only 2 hours a day and finish it up on a Thursday.
On Friday I review the work and decide what’s next
In my company Friday is a special day, because on Friday we don’t work on day-to-day tasks. We do our “Weekly Review”, which basically means reviewing all of our tasks, projects and calendar for the past week and planning next week. After that we dedicate this day to personal development. I’ve written about it in the past, we call it a “Mighty Friday”.
For CORE HOURS concept Friday means I’ve got the time to also review what I’ve done over the past 4 days in my 2-hour deep work sessions:
- If the idea is developed, I write it up and delegate it to someone on my team or it goes to the list of the things I need to implement in the future.
- If it’s not ready yet, I make a decision whether I want to continue working on this idea next week, or want to put it back for later and choose a new idea to work on.
Every Friday it’s time for a new decision. Sometimes I want to continue with the same thing next week, but usually I just want to take a break and work on something different for a change. Either way, it’s important to write down the key takeaways and conclusions after each week. To basically journal what I’ve found, what I started, what I finished or what I still don’t know. This way when I need to pick up this idea in the future, I’ll be able to quickly catch up and keep advancing.
CORE HOURS = work on 1 idea for 2 hours per day and change the world!
I challenge you to give CORE HOURS a try. Schedule a 2-hour block for the next week from Monday to Thursday and dedicate it to just one idea. You’ll see how much progress you’ll make and how much you’ll enjoy working like this. No interruptions, no distractions… just focused deep work.
If you’ve been struggling to find time to work on your most creative ideas recently, give CORE HOURS concept a chance and contact me to let me know how it went. I’m looking forward to hearing from you and celebrating your successes!
PS. Which books inspired me to create the CORE HOURS technique?
CORE HOURS is a remix concept inspired by several books and authors, most notably:
- “Deep Work” by Cal Newport
- “Essentialism” and “Effortless” by Greg McKeown
- “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
- “Getting Things Done” by David Allen
- “Hell Yes or No” by Derek Sivers