Productivity: tuning into your own energy and passion to design ideal days and weeks

If you had spoken to me a year ago about work, productivity, and tapping into the power of time to be more productive — I would have never believed it was possible. 2015 was an incredibly intense year for me, with three major projects (Kiwi Landing Pad, 90 Seconds, and University) all competing for my attention.

I tried to manage the stress of these projects my maximising my use of time and my output in that time. I realised that if I exercised four times per week, I could stay awake an extra two hours per day. If I combined social outings and making healthy food choices, I was better nourished to work harder too. I was on a mission to work as long and hard as possible, and reduced my sleep to an average of four hours per night.

Sounds miserable, right? I didn’t realise it at first, but my learning curve was steep: though I was able to get through a lot of work, it also cost me in terms of health, wellness, and even in my relationships.

By the end of a three-month stint, I was so exhausted I could barely string sentences together. I became forgetful, emotional, anxious, aggravated, and my brain physically shut down when I burnt out entirely. I ended up spending a week sleeping a lot, relaxing, and thinking about anything other than work in order to recover.

Looking back, I want to understand why being “busy” accomplishing all my work didn’t actually make me successful — at least not completely. The work certainly got done, but it was hard on my brain, my relationships, and my long term productivity.

I started looking for patterns in how I work, what I enjoy doing, and when in my week I’m more suited to doing certain activities. I spent several months examining my own habits, and realised the following:

• I love claiming my mornings, having a good healthy breakfast, exercising and planning my day.
• Out of every five days, three of them are super productive and I’m basically like an efficiency robot. Another of those days, I’m quite extroverted, and the final day I’m exhausted, less focused, and more suited to doing menial tasks.
• Friday nights and Saturday afternoons are my most inspired, creative, and reflective times.
• Relaxing and having fun on Saturday & Sunday allows for a very productive Monday.
• How I run my Monday morning is how my week plays out.
• Tuesday or Wednesday nights my brain is on fire, I’m usually very awake.

I also learned about my own energy, productivity, and focus levels in a way I had never realised — but had probably always been struggling to understand. Now, I could take this knowledge to structure my weeks:

Monday

• My morning starts off right: yoga and meditation to set the tone for the week, clear my head, and be calm.
• Have all of my ‘big meetings’ this day and also do all of my heavy loading and strategy/proposals when I’m in hyper productive mode.

Tuesday & Wednesday

• Working through the other strategic and networking aspects of my job(s).
• In the evenings, I work on community concepts or creative, future proofing, ideas, drawing board, since I’m really productive.

Thursday

• My extroverted, meeting day. Shifting the majority of my meetings to one day makes the rest of the week more productive. I also get into flow with what I’m talking about if I have a day with all meetings. This is also my spend the day out of the office.

Friday

• My tired, least productive day means administration and operations tasks.

Friday Night & Saturday Afternoon

• Writing time. This is my creative time where I do my most thinking, best writing and can reflect, be inspired without interruption.

Saturday & Sunday

• When I have my fun. I started paying little to no attention to my phone on the weekends the last few that I was in San Francisco. At first, I felt guilty that I wasn’t working all the time. But then I learned I was way more productive if I operated this way.

This is just an example of how you can run your week. This works for me based on how my brain and body works, but you’ll be entirely different. Some people are more morning people others are night owls. Do what works for you, the key here is figured it out and structure it.

Once you understand and optimise your use of time, you may fit a week’s work into two days working 10 hours both of those days. This is why it helps to understand which days and times of days are most (and least) productive for you.

This is why we can now ask: do hours matter? When I first started working, I was taught to always be the first to arrive and the last to leave. While that was a great lesson while I was getting started in my career, I feel like it no longer applies, as long as your output is large. The good thing is that you can train yourself to tap into this energy and knowledge — Tim Ferriss is a master of this and his 4-Hour Workweek revolutionised the way we work for this reason.

I haven’t completely figured this out for myself, but here’s an example of how many I would set out the hours in my week.

• Monday — 12 hours
• Tuesday — 7 hours
• Wednesday — 6 hours + 2 hours at night
• Thursday — 5 hours
• Friday — 5 hours + 3 hours on Friday nights/Saturday afternoons

You’ll notice this is still a 40 hour week, however I’m doing most of my heavy lifting at the start of the week when I know I am the most productive.

It’s important to note: no matter how you break down your week and hours worked, there is no badge of honor for working 80 hours a week. Are you happy working those 80 hours or do you complain about it and wish you could work less? Claim your life; the execution is not in the hours.

For me this is a work in progress, but something that I am very aware of. I want to have a more holistic and balanced life whilst continuing to run and speed up. I want to have everything in my life that I value while still making progress and leveling up but without the stress and lack of time. All it took was insight into my own energy and productivity, and I was able to start crafting a work week that fits much better for me — and produces far more value on each product I work on.