How to create the perfect daily schedule

I have always been one for optimising my time for the most productive version of myself. I have written about a number of methods and tools I use to be productive in the past but I have never written about how I create a daily schedule.

Optimising your productivity to the time of day comes from a lot of reading about the body, sleep cycles and our biological rhythms. Taking this knowledge and applying it to my productivity cycles I am able to schedule my day to get the most out of every hour.

Studies suggest that the time of day you choose to complete a task can have a 20% variance in your performance, speed and output. If everything is equal you will perform worse on a task in the afternoon than you will on the exact same task in the morning. There are differences here for night owls and morning larks — yes they are a thing.

Timing isn’t everything, but it’s a big thing.

Daniel Pink

As much as 80% of the population experience a similar pattern of energy and mood fluctuation throughout the day. Energy and mood tend to rise in the morning, go down in the afternoon, and rise again slightly in the late afternoon or evening. Those people are called morning larks or early birds.

The other twenty per cent of people are night owls. They experience the same pattern but in reverse and shifted later in the day: Energy and mood tend to be moderately high in the early afternoon, low in the early evening, and highest in the late evening and into the early morning.

Peak Time

Peak time is when your energy and focus are at their highest. This is when you’ll perform the best on analytical work and have the most focus. If you are a programmer working on the latest complex AI problems or a writer it is the best time to sit down and write your masterpiece. Once you have found your peak time it is imperative you protect this time at all costs.

Don’t let small and simple tasks interrupt your peak time and schedule this time on your calendar to make sure you are always available and free during your time of deep work and focus.

Trough Time

Trough time is the exact opposite of peak time. This is when your energy is at its lowest. You feel mentally and/or physically tired and unfocused. Morning larks call this the afternoon slump.

Trying to stay focused during trough time is a sure-fire way to lead to you getting frustrated with your work and will only make things worse, leading to fatigue and resentment towards the work at hand. It’s a great time to do things that need to be done but isn’t a core part of your work. This is when I start doing my admin work and reconciling accounts, work that is not mentally taxing but does move the needle forward in the bigger picture of the business. The kinds of tasks that are graded pass/fail — either you did them or you didn’t do them — where quality doesn’t matter.

Rebound Time

Finally, we have rebound time. This is when your energy and attention aren’t at their peak but you can still focus. Research shows that people are at their most creative during their rebound time. Instead of just doing the same kind of work you’d do during your peak time but slower and a little bit worse, consider switching gears to tasks that require insight and creativity.

Following on from the above example of a writer as I have first-hand experience here having to write a lot of content every day. This is when I focus on getting new content started, a brain dump onto a page. Once I have these rough drafts out I will then spend my peak time refining them and editing them before publishing.

Putting it all together

Now we have covered the 3 main phases of energy we all go through every day it is time to start planning your work and tasks around when you will have the energy to match them. I do this with tags in Things 3, my task manager of choice, I have 3 tags.

Peak Energy

This identifies tasks that require the most focus and mental power to get done

Low Energy

These are the done or not done tasks that should be completed in trough time and don’t require mental smarts to achieve.

Medium Energy

These are my rebound tasks for which I need some mental processing power but don’t need to be on my a-game to get the basics out.