Maintaining control of a demanding work and home schedule can be difficult. In fact, a Gallup poll found that 41% of U.S. adults feel like they don’t have enough time to do everything they want.
Gretchen Rubin, happiness expert and author of “Outer Order, Inner Calm,” tells CNBC Make It that anyone who feels overwhelmed by their load during the work-week should do one simple thing over the weekend to feel more productive.
“Give yourself an hour,” she says. “‘Power hour’ is when you set aside an hour on the weekend to just do all the things that you’ve been procrastinating about.”
She says that “things that can be done at any time are often done at no time.” Implementing a dedicated hour to check off things on your to-do list will prevent tasks from building up “for weeks or maybe even months.”
“‘Power hour’ is a way to keep [things] manageable,” she says, “especially for people who are super busy and don’t want to spend the entire afternoon of one of their precious weekend days clearing clutter.”
In her book, she says that anyone with “a long list of unpleasant chores” should write down all the tasks they want to get accomplished and then, on a weekly basis, block out time to get them done. “Little by little, we can get a lot accomplished,” she says.
Rubin adds that to make your weekend power hour less stressful, you should put forth effort during the week to maintain order and organization.
“One thing to remember is that it’s easier to keep up than to catch up,” she says. “So do as much as you can do along the way that’s going to make it more pleasant for you as you go through your work week. That’s going to make less work for you on the weekend.”
For example, she says, people are often so busy that they get in the habit of just throwing things on the floor rather than putting things away. “In the end,” she says, “it just kind of builds up and makes you feel more out of control or more kind of pounded by all of the stuff that you need to do.”
“If you can steel yourself and take a few minutes and clean as you go, you’re going to feel better during the work-week, and then you can have less work on the weekend.”
Video by Emma Fierberg
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