How to unlock a secret hour each day

Every meeting in your calendar has a hidden secret, hidden in plain sight → the minutes directly before and after a meeting.

This compounds the more meetings you have everyday, secretly stealing your time.

In this stolen time your can’t start anything big as you won’t finish, so this time goes unused.

Your secret hour

Add up all this time and you get your secret hour, time that is wasted every day. That’s 5 hours per week of strategic work that goes undone!

But this time can be recovered, look at your todo list and break it up as follows:

1. Break all tasks into 10-15 minute chunks
2. Make sure all the context for the work is contained in the todo item

Use your secret hour

When you have a meeting, or a gap between meetings pick an item from your broken down todo list and complete it before the meeting. Each task on this list is small, and it comes with its own context so you won’t need to context switch.

Keep this up and you will cover a lot of ground! That’s 5 hours of extra strategic work, or getting through your $1 tasks freeing up more time for longer strategic sessions.