4 Creative Concepts for Perfect Productivity
Don’t manage your time, manage your energy
We’ve all met hustle culture before. Optimize every minute of every day to make the most of your output. The longer you can keep this up, the longer you’ll be in the green.
The danger is in any forfeiture of movement.
Everyone around you is grinding just as hard or harder on their work than you are. Showing any signs of slowing down — God forbid stopping for a short while — and your competition will surpass you.
The rules are simple. They’re just not made for humans.
The issue is that we’re human. And humans make for terrible machines.
The hustle culture model presents real life as being in the red of productivity. The only way to stop the bleeding is to cement yourself into the grand machine, incapable of burnout — and become a robot, an automaton who doesn’t need to eat, sleep, or shit.
In a morbid way, I’m attracted to the lifestyle. Ever since I started taking writing seriously, I’ve been putting time aside to optimize my work. Anything from routine building to (most recently) looking into alternative keyboard layouts.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I like progress. I like optimization. Improvements, however incremental.
And routines are important. Allotting time to certain tasks before needing to switch to the next one is a great way to keep your output train running on schedule. There’s a certain relief that comes with being in complete control of your time.
But I’ve experienced the fallout of our productivity war.
It’s pretty easy to see why people burnout:
SCHEDULED TIME + HARD WORK = PERFECT OUTPUT
Nowhere in this equation is there an axis for the most important resource we have at our disposal.
We have to stop looking at productivity as a function of our time and start looking at it as a function of our energy.
Without enough energy to complete these tasks, any chance of keeping up with your schedule becomes a far greater challenge. I have yet to read a self-help book whose focus is on energy optimization, rather than time optimization.
Since I’ve started focusing on managing my energy, every part of my working day has felt more vivid, brilliant, and insightful.
Here are 4 ways to increase your productivity by managing your energy, rather than your time:
1 — Know your chronotype, when you typically sleep
The book Why We Sleep details the three types of sleepers, or chronotypes: early birds, larks (or third birds), and night owls, depending on when you naturally tend to sleep and wake up.
Knowing your chronotype is important because it’s the easiest and biggest piece of the energy problem you can solve for.
Author, Matthew Walker, notes that no matter what kind of sleeper you are, intellectual and creative ability serve us best in the hours after we wake up, dip a bit in the afternoon, then return in the evening. All this coincides with a similar swing in our energy.
He also makes it very clear that everybody on the planet needs around 7–9 hours of sleep per night in order to maintain their energy during the day.
In paying attention to my sleep habits, I’ve discovered my aptitude is more like a lark than a night owl or early bird. I wake up around mid-morning and usually fall asleep an hour or two after midnight.
What this means is that the late morning and early afternoon is my first and best window for producing quality work. I notice that the mid-afternoon is when my energy begins to wane, then picks back up again in the early evening.
2–Track your uptimes and downtimes, prioritize uptimes
I refer to these periods as uptime and downtime. Uptime is the window of time you can spend doing deep, high-impact work — work that provides more long-term value and usually requires more mental and physical effort.
Downtime is the period best spent completing more low impact, shallow tasks that you can do mindlessly and autopilot your way through.
Anything from watching Netflix to going on a walk counts as downtime. Downtime is equally important as uptime and serves as an energy recovery period so that the following uptime can be even more productive.
The only way to leverage your energy to make the most of your uptime and downtime is to monitor your activity throughout the day. Reflect on when you feel the most alert and engaged, and when your energy feels low.
Successfully taking notes on your energy swings helps create a schedule that prioritizes uptime while also making downtime work for you.
My uptimes and downtimes usually correspond with Walker’s outline, higher energy at either end of the day with a dip in the middle.
In my uptime I do intellectual and creative work, researching and drafting articles like this, making music, or engaging deeply in whatever book or books I’m reading at that time.
Avoid burnout by chunking greater tasks into smaller ones. For example, if you’re also attempting to create a piece of YouTube content, the task completed during your uptime might not be “create YouTube video,” but might be to edit what you’ve recorded instead.
Instead of writing a chapter of your new book, focus on a paragraph.
In my downtime, I usually watch content related to the things I want to write about later as a sort of passive productivity or consume unrelated content purely for what I’ll call “awe-inspiration,” that I can’t tie into my own work but can appreciate from an intellectual distance.
Lately, I’ve been watching homesteading content on YouTube — the idea of building a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, rigging it up with electricity and plumbing, and eventually growing a garden in the surrounding lands to sustain yourself off of is an intriguing concept to me.
No matter your energy cycle, allocate your best hours towards high-impact tasks.
3 — How to account for energy fluctuations
Even after knowing your chronotype and charting your typical daily energy cycle, it is unreasonable to expect your absolute best work during every uptime of every day.
No amount of energy management and optimization will make us machines.
But I think we can get pretty close.
Sinem Günel wrote an excellent article about how she manages her energy, breaking her days into three categories:
1. Focus, where: high-impact work is done. Sinem’s focus days are spent purely on money-making activities, writing, creating courses, and interacting with her students.
During my focus days, I try to write as much as possible, being sure to synthesize my ideas into useful content. I get some reading done throughout the day that acts as a sort of primer for my brain that helps me mentally prepare to write.
2. Buffer, where: organizational and preparation work is done. Sinem notes that buffer activities are the tedious parts of her job that might distract her in a focus day. Anything from responding to emails to accounting takes place on her buffer days.
On buffer days, I prioritize reading and idea input over everything else. I’ll also loosely draft articles, writing a general structure and ideas I want to discuss in the article. I’ll also interact more with the Medium community, commenting and responding with the ideas that intrigue me.
3. And free days, where: time and energy are spent in physical interaction. Spending time with family and socializing is how Sinem recharges.
I still haven’t made peace with free days. Maybe it’s my greenness in the writing space, but I find it difficult to not be thinking about what I’ve been reading, writing, and consuming.
When I notice my energy depleting, I force myself to play video games (a sentence I never thought I’d say), which have worked like magic to replenish my energy and drive to produce quality work.
4 — Energy recovery
I have two means of replenishing my energy.
On focus and buffer days, when I break for lunch, I’ll consume content (alongside delicious calories) that I’m interested in lately. YouTube and Medium content that is somewhat related to the articles I’m writing are usually what I go for.
On free days, I consume content unrelated to recent work. Anything I can binge mindlessly qualifies as “productive” use of my downtime. This type of relaxation is especially necessary during times when I’ve been on the verge of burnout. I find that returning to work after a well-spent free day allows me to recover and maintain a solid pace and quality of my output.
I’ve also been taking fun seriously by playing video games.¹ There’s a similar warmth to making progress in a game that I experience when writing. I’m trying to expand my palate for gaming, when I’ve found more games I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, I’ll share my thoughts in another article.
For now, I hope these concepts have given you the means to think differently about your productivity, and that you can integrate them into your routines.
More value for you — I’ve written this piece as an addition to a series called Perfect Productivity. Its home is on a list on my profile. Read it now.
Even more value for you — Here’s Sinem Günel’s article about the focus, buffer, and free days I mentioned. I’ve been reading her work as a way to study my craft to provide a better means to share my ideas with you in the future.
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