The “Power Hour” Method (How Smart Freelancers Work)

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 384
Welcome to the Six Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Do you ever feel like you were working nonstop for weeks, and months, and years, but somehow after all this time, you were still stuck in the same place? Well, in this episode, I'm going to show you how you can get way more out of the hours that you already have, both at the micro level, like what do you actually do during your days, and then on the bigger picture, the macro level, what you're actually working on in your business. And the goal here is to figure out what actually matters in your business, so you can stop wasting energy on the wrong things. Because remember, if you are not making progress in your business, and you're spending hours every day, and days every week, and weeks every year, and on your business with little to no progress, you know you're working on the wrong things. Now remember, we all have the same 24 hours in every day. No one has the advantage there. In the last week's episode, I asked the question, why can some people get more done than others in that 24-hour period? Now, one lever you can pull is trade-offs, aka what are you willing to give up in the short term to gain what you want in the long term? That's what last week's episode was all about. What are you willing to give up to get what you want? Now, the other lever and the focus of today's episode is working on the right things, aka prioritization. At the end of this episode, I'm also going to walk you through the three biggest issues that hold freelancers back from properly prioritizing, because knowing how to prioritize and actually prioritizing are two completely different things. Now, if you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more from their creative skills without selling their souls. If that sounds like you, you're at the right place. I take a lot of influence from a lot of different areas, a lot of different businesses that I've run, a lot of businesses that I continue to run, a lot of the clients that we work with and then my team of 11-plus people at this point from all over the world who all bring different flavors of business and marketing and systems and processes with them. We have a lot to pull from in the 6 Figure Creative community, and my goal is to bring all of those learnings to this podcast for you, the listener, who may be relatively isolated. Maybe you are an entrepreneur who doesn't really have entrepreneurial friends. Maybe you're the only business owner you know and how are you supposed to learn how to run your business if you don't have others around you? My goal is to be one of hopefully many influencers that you have from other podcasts, influencers, I'm not an influencer, but the real influencers, the big guys out there, you know, the Christos of the world. Hopefully, you have those other people in your ears too. I am privileged to be one of those for you today. And hopefully, you'll stick around. Now, let's talk about how to get the most out of your time, the time that you have, the 24 hours. And I first need to talk about why prioritization matters more than time itself. Because remember, we all have the same 24 hours. If everyone has the same 24 hours, then we know that some people are wasting those 24 hours pretty poorly. This is the most insidious part about prioritization. It's not like you are sitting around in your ass doing absolutely nothing all day every day, and that billionaires are out there literally working 24 hours straight with no sleep, and they have some drug they're injecting into their veins to stay up 24 hours a day, so they can work more and make more money than we'll ever be able to do. It's not like that at all. It's just that certain people are better at prioritization. Now, I'm not going to get into the ethics behind billionaires and all that stuff, but let's just bring it down to it. And even playing field for freelancers out there, why are some freelancers more successful than others?
Some of it's skill, some of it's creativity. Some people are just naturally the absolute pinnacle of their craft and will sometimes yield better results. Some people are naturally more charismatic, and so there's the it factor. They just are more likable, and you just can't compete with that. But on a relatively even playing field, most people who are successful generally are better at prioritization. And if you spend your time without proper priorities, you're generally most likely wasting effort. And I've been through seasons in my own life where I've worked 10, 12, 15 hours a day and accomplished less in the grand scheme of things, did less for my business than in seasons in my life where I was working two hours a day. And it's just because in those seasons where I was only working two hours a day, I was so hyper focused and ruthless with what I was actually working on, which should be the right things, that the other six hours ultimately didn't matter much. Now, obviously, if you can work six to eight to ten amazing productive hours and really focus and really prioritize properly, you're going to go to new heights never before reached. But most people, like me, don't have the energy to do that. So if you're low energy or you have a family or you have other things pulling you away, prioritization is the only way to make this work. Let's talk about micro first. Micro, teeny tiny, itty bitty. What should you do throughout your day? From sun up to sun down, what should your days look like? Now, this is how I like them to be, and this is coming from the perspective of a full time freelancer, someone who has got their entire day devoted to their business. If you have a day job, this is not gonna look the same for you, unfortunately. You can take bits and pieces of it, but generally the people that I work with, the ones that I talk to all day, are already the full time people. This is not like a beginner's podcast, and if you've listened to more than one episode, you probably already know this. Doesn't mean you can't get something out of this podcast if you're a beginner, but it does mean that there are probably better podcasts out there for you if you are a beginner, and there may be a lot of stuff that goes over your head. And also, I won't cater to beginners for this. So let's just assume you're a full-time freelancer. What does a day look like on the micro scale? First thing I want to talk about is something I call power hours. Power hours. This is where you block out the first one or two hours of your day when you are the most sharp, when you're the most focused, when you have the most creative energy, the most brain power, to focus on the most important growth activity in your business. I used to call these my sacred work hours, and this would be like the hours where I just shut everything off and no one can talk to me, no one can text me, and it's still basically the same, but I like the term power hours. They're a little more catchy, but this is where you figure out what your bottleneck is. What is the one thing that if I solve this, it fixes everything else in my business or makes everything else in my business matter more. And this is also working what I call on your business. Working in your business is where you actually are doing your creative tasks, you're trading your hours for dollars, you're doing the creative work, you're making the deliverables. All that stuff can come later. We'll talk about when that fits in, but the first one to two hours is blocked out, phone on silence, put it in another room, put it in a drawer, somewhere out of the way so that you can focus and have zero distractions. Now, there's a couple of things that matter a lot here when it comes to your own power hours. One is knowing your own energy levels, what hours you like to operate the most, knowing your own schedule. I work on a very, very rigid schedule. I'm generally in bed by 8.3 or 9, asleep by 9.3 or 10, up at 5:30 a.m. on the dot. My alarm goes off at that same exact time every day. I read morning brew or daily hustle for 15 minutes. I get up, I pee, I weigh myself on my scale. It syncs to my phone and Apple Health. I get a thing of water and I go to the gym. Like, that's how regimented I am. And I do the gym first thing in the morning. When I come back, I make breakfast, and then I start my power hours. For some of you, maybe you work out in the evening, and maybe when you first wake up, that's the perfect time to have the power hours. Power hours, then breakfast, or you breakfast and then power hours. Just find something that works for you, but I'm gonna skip all the minutia stuff, all the gym and wake up and reading, and you're a cold plunge, bro, and I gotta do my sauna.