If, like many of us, you struggle to stay on top of all your chores and life admin because of anxiety or just general busyness, TikTok creator Laur Wheeler (@classiclaur) has a very useful solution to share: a “scary hour”.
It’s the time when you’ll respond to messages you’ve not yet replied to, open mail, or simply do the household chores you’ve been pushing to the end of your to-do list.
And it might just mean that you get a lot more done each week.
So, how do you get started on a “scary hour”?
It’s more simple than you’d think and surprisingly not all that scary.
Simply set a timer for one hour and in that hour, get the things done that you need to get done. Tidy, make calls, reply to messages, whatever has been weighing on your mind – now is the time to tackle it.
TikTok creator Laur said, for her, it’s often a good chance to reply to messages and calls – things she would often avoid because of anxiety.
She recommends starting with the things that are scaring you the least and working your way up from there.
The thinking is that once you’ve done one scary thing, you’ll feel brave enough to move on to another – and those tasks that were intimidating you won’t seem quite so difficult over the course of that hour.
Once the hour is up, you can keep going with the productivity streak or you can rest assured that you got a lot done in that short space of time and call it quits.
Having an hour limit gives you an endpoint to look forward to and, as the minutes tick by, assurance that you’re not far from your goal.
This can be beneficial for home, the workplace, or any ongoing projects that you’ve been putting off. And while you might not get everything you need to get done in that time, you’ll have taken the steps to get started – often a stumbling block for many of us.
As a commenter on TikTok said, “I only have to be brave one hour a day? NIce, I’ll try it for a week and see how it goes.”