TABATA MY JOB

A few times a week I head to the ever so lovely Xcel gym.  When I do-gasping my way through the workout- I'm inevitably met with uncomprehending stares, as though an alien had suddenly descended from the sky and plopped itself down in front of the pull-up bar.
But if my ways seems strange to my gymmates, theirs are equally bewildering to me: hours-long sessions spent wondering the floor, punctuated by short sets of preacher curls or goes at the hip-adductor machine.  How, I wonder can people work, day in and day out, so inefficiently?!  The answer, I recently realized, is practice.
And not just at the gym.  Studies show that the average American worker spends ten hours a day at the office, yet, after chatting with colleagues, surfing the web, and strolling to the water cooler, accomplishes just one and a half hours of actual work.  In other words, 85% of the time most people spend at the office goes completely down the drain.
I was initially drawn into our workouts by the brutal efficiency of the approach: such little time, such great results.  Which is why, marveling one day at the comparative inefficiency if the gym-goers around me, I started to wonder if what flows into the gym also flows back out.  If most people bring bad habits from work to working out, could I take good instilled habits in the opposite direction?  Could I Tababta my job?
At its heart, Tabata is simple: eight brief intervals of 20 seconds of very intense effort, separated by an equal number of even briefer intervals of rest, 10 seconds.  As twenty seconds of job productivity seemed slight even by my procrastinatory, distraction-prone standards, I decided to stick with the idea but adjust the time-frames, bumping them up to ten minutes work, five minutes rest.  Eight intervals, then, take exactly two hours.
Here's how it works: Take the eight tasks at the top of your to-do list.  This is important.  Don't cherry-pick tasks, as it leaves the ones you don't want to face floating on your list for weeks on end.  As painful as each Tabata may be, it's also brief enough to be endurable; the same goes for ten minutes of any of your work tasks.  Whip your interval timer out of your gym bag, and set it for eight ten-minute/five-minute repeats.  Fire it up, and jump in on the first task.
When the bell chimes, stop.  Seriously, stop.  It doesn't matter if you aren't finished.  Just put down what you're doing.  You'll get to it later that day, or; for painful, avoided tasks, in the next day's Tabata pass.  Then spend five minutes goofing off.  Surf the web, hit the bathroom, fire spitballs at the obnoxious guy two cubicles over.  It doesn't matter what you do, so long as it's not work.
But, once the timer next beeps, immediately jump back in for task number two.  Hit it hard, knowing that, as soon as you start, you're literally just minutes from  moving on.
Rinse and repeat until you're made it through the two-hour block.
Sure, it doesn't sound like much.  But the first morning I tried, Tabata My Job helped me blow through more work in two hours than I had in whole days the week prior.  Even better, it allowed me to cross several tasks that had long been looming at the top of my list.  In fact, in future Tabata runs, I discovered that many of the scariest tasks were actually remarkably brief-well withing ten minutes-once I finally buckled down and jumped in.