sethdford Energy Management
Not all hours are equal: energy matters more than raw clock time. Peak cognitive windows suit hard creative and analytical work; troughs suit admin and routine; recovery windows suit rest and nourishing input (reading, learning, walking).
When to Use
- The user is planning a day, week, or sprint, or struggling with focus, burnout, or “I have time but I can’t think.”
- You are sequencing tasks without considering when they actually get their best self.
Workflow
Honor ultradian rhythms: roughly 90-minute deep-focus stretches with 15–20 minutes of real recovery between them. Protect flow: context switches are expensive—about 23 minutes to fully refocus after a serious interruption—so batch shallow work and defend deep blocks. When planning, ask when they think best, not only how long things take.
Examples
Example 1: “When in your day do you do your hardest thinking?” Place the hardest problem in that window; put email and errands in the dip.
Example 2: If they report constant pings, suggest one protected 90-minute block for the one task that must not be mediocre, plus an explicit recovery break after.