power hour

Last weekend, I went over to my guy friends' house for a movie night. I had never seen Inception and I was excited to watch it. Everything was going fine until I had to use the bathroom. As a frame of reference, there are 5 guys that live in the house. As you can imagine, the bathroom was all kinds of nasty.

After the movie, I complained to my friends about how gross their bathroom was. I demanded some cleaning supplies so I could start cleaning for them (I have a thing about cleaning bathrooms...for some reason, I really enjoy it). They stopped me, saying that they were planning on spending a "power hour" later that weekend cleaning their house.

The concept of the power hour really intrigued me. What would it look like to harness the power of my utmost focus on a tedious task that I don't really feel like doing most of the time? I bet I would be able to get a whole heck of a lot more done than dragging my feet and whining.

For me, that means getting started on internship applications. I need to start researching the internships that I'm interested in and then start reworking my resume to fit each company. Additionally, I need to start making decisions on where I want to spend my summer; whether in Hawai`i, SLO or the Bay. There's a lot of factors to think about, which is why I've been procrastinating doing it.

But during my power hour, no excuses are allowed. It will strictly be all work and no play. Taking a cue from this article, I will block my access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. I will make enough progress to at least come up with a system that lets me systematically attack the heap of things to do. That way, I won't have to make another power hour to get everything done, but take parts of it with me to do when I have a few free minutes. For example, by accomplishing the decision of where I want to apply for summer during my power hour, I can print out the applications and take them with me to complete when I'm waiting for class to start or needing a study break.

This weekend. Power hour. It's going down. Anyone else with me?