OneHourADay app briefly free

What could you achieve in just one hour a day?

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion – So what happens you set just one hour a day for to achieve your goals?

By breaking down a goal into smaller hourly tasks, it will not only make it easier but also more effective in achieving your goals.

Try this simple app, that helps you get down your desired goals and also a detailed description then start the timer when you are ready to dedicate one hour of your day to achieve your goals. The timer will stop at one completed hour until the next day. It will also keep a running total of all the hours you have achieved towards your goal.

You can set a daily reminder and add additional goals.

Example Goals:
Revising for exams
Playing the Piano
Write a book

Give it a go and see what you could achieve in just one hour a day!

Parents, stop laughing. For everybody else, maybe yes, maybe you can get an hour spare to work on your goals. Even if it’s not necessarily 60 minutes in a row.

I’m not sure of the value of this app. I already work in hours, it just seems to suit me to do one hour on this then one hour on that. But I do it most of the time by asking Siri on my iPhone to set a timer for an hour. (Sometimes Siri tells me “Remember: a watched iPhone never boils.”) So if you have an iPhone that can run OneHourADay, you don’t actually need OneHourADay.

But it looks good, it’s a positive reminder of what you want to do and there is something satisfying about seeing it on your screen. Plus, it was £1.49 (or $1.99) and it’s now briefly free, so do take a look. Watch that it’s still free when you check out that link, though: I’m expecting the free offer to expire soon.

Push on

I’ve said this before but I happen to work best in hour-long chunks. It took me ages to find that out but it’s true and I try to stick to it now. Except, once you’ve set a timer for sixty minutes and begun working, there comes a time.

It’s usually between thirty and forty minutes into the run when you are spent.

Seriously, you’d give anything to to stop now, that’s enough, I’m out of ideas, it’s all over, surely I’ve been good, I can take the rest of the hour off, please, I’m begging now.

Push on, okay?

I’m saying this to you now because I’ve been reminded of why. I did an hour on a project I’ve been putting off for a while and, yes, just over thirty minutes in, I wanted to stop. I tapped on my iPhone to see how long was left and it was about 26 minutes. Rarely has 26 minutes looked so long.

But I did push on and in those final 26 minutes I pretty much finished the project. Got over the difficult bit, found a clever – I think – solution to an issue, drove on into new territory and found new things. When the timer sounded, I flicked at it to shut the bleedin’ thing up, I’m working.

I do also believe very much in stopping after the hour, in stopping when you are at that full flow. It sounds wrong but if you leave at the top, you come back later ready and rearing to go. If you stop when you fizzle out, you come back pre-fizzled.

But anyway, how great is it that I wanted to continue? This thing I’d been putting off, this thing at with 26 minutes left to go I was thinking kettles and biscuits and breakfast, now I’m on a burn with it and am near-as-dammit finished. That is finished in the writer’s sense of the word where it means finished, yes, but nowhere near done yet. But still, finished.

And because I pushed on to the end of the hour.

I think you can smell the smugness from there and I can only apologise. But it’s worth my looking irritating to you if it makes you try this too – and I think if you try it, it will make you feel this good as well. The only thing I don’t know is whether you need an hour. It’s so right for me, somehow, but plenty of others work best in half-hour sprints or two-hour marathons. Just pick a time, a duration, that’s a bit hard. If it’s easy, you don’t get that half-time slump so you don’t get the chance to rise above it.

I’m all for rising above things, I should do me some more of that, but it’s a combination of the satisfaction of rising above a problem and the resulting liberation that matters. At that 26-minutes-to-go point, I had a problem I couldn’t solve and ended up just trying different approaches until I found one that broke through. After that, I was just slamming down points and ideas and issues and they were coming out of nowhere, or so it seemed. That rush after the dam is fresh and it feels new and good.

‘Course, I’m a writer, I may look at this later and think it’s all nonsense, I can do much better than this tosh. But at least I’ll be thinking I can do much better. And it is always and forever easier to change something on the page than it is to make the first scratches on the paper.

Actually… today was my 245th day of getting up at 5am and it was the hardest in a couple of hundred. I’ve not come so close to turning over and carrying on sleeping since the very earliest of the days. So I pushed on then and I pushed on during the hour. No wonder I reek of smugness.

Sorry about that.