Kleinscheiss Tag is a beautiful German concept that could be translated as Hate Day.
It means it's a day and on that day you would only do the things you hate such that you would procrastinate and wouldn't take action otherwise, such as paying taxes, doing laundry, preparing a presentation, etc. The ultimate Monday on steroids...
It can be very effective:
- To control animal emotions such as worry and anxiety, and as a result it helps you stay healthier in the long run. You don't always need to think about these crude tasks anymore because they have their own dedicated time to be handled.
- To control your energy levels and improve your output because less energy spent on emotional control means more energy and capacity are available for logical reasoning and creation.
- To save time because tasks are batched and there is no more jumping between tasks.
- To focus. This is mostly a reiteration of the previous points but not exactly because extra energy could be spent on something else than what you would actually want. It can achieve it in two ways: a) you can stop any desires early on by better controlling emotions -kill the snake while its head is tiny- b) you can have a momentum by working on the same thing for a large chunk of time.
- To build habits. Brain needs/consumes a lot of energy (~20% of overall) and doesn't like costly processes. That's why brain loves routines to optimise any task because optimised tasks are transferred into reflexes and they require less energy for their startup and processing. If a task is executed on a specific schedule, it will likely be picked up by brain to be put into its own optimised reference frame.
- To get more done by killing external attention seekers. Since they are put into a calendar, your time is clearly blocked and it's very unlikely that you would be disturbed by something else and so you would actually work on them.
- To be (more) honest. It's very easy to lie to yourselves, especially for things you don't want to do. It reduces the times you need to lie (one day vs everyday) and the cases you need to lie because it provides various benefits to handle them more efficiently. The less lies are said (even if only to yourselves), the more honest, confident and responsible person you become. A lie is one of the worst evil for the brain, messes with your reference frames (reality) and hinders learning (so everything).
Might want to give a try!