Leverage Your Peak Productivity Window

Everyone has their own natural rhythms throughout the day, and it's important to plan work according to your corresponding energy levels. Some may find themselves to be most focused in the mornings, and others may experience a burst of energy in the afternoon or at night.

Whichever describes you best, it is important that you leverage your peak productivity window by completing the tasks that require the most energy during that time.

 

Most likely you won't have multiple peaks throughout the day, so ensure the windows are only reserved for deep work sessions. Come prepared, eliminate distractions, and find a suitable environment in order to take full advantage of these limited opportunities.

 

As an example, let's consider the current time here while I write this guide, which is 7:15 AM. Recognizing that my peak focus occurs between 6-8 AM, 1 am intentionally using this time to write the guide because it's the most demanding task today.

Additionally, I have taken proactive measures to enhance my productivity such as carefully planning the sections I will be writing, leaving my phone in a different room, and cleaning my workspace. By implementing these strategies, I am giving myself the best opportunity to fully leverage the heightened focused period and achieve optimal results.

 

After 8 AM, I will take a break, eat breakfast, and workout. Then once I return to the office, I will have less demanding tasks to complete such as responding to emails and taking a short pretest for my Biosimulation class in the afternoon.

 

By deliberately aligning my schedule with my natural energy levels, I'm able to produce oualitv work efficiently.

If you are unsure of your peak productivity window, I would encourage you to spend a week tracking your energy levels, monitoring both natural fluctuations and external factors that influence your focus.

Then the following week, experiment with various time frames that align with the patterns you have identified. You may have to go through multiple reiterations before finding your window, but it will be more than worth it.

 

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Second Brain

Founded by productivity expert Tiago Forte, the second brain is an external, centralized, digital repository for all the things you learn. He explains that the average individual consumes the equivalent of 174 newspapers of information per day. For people of younger generations like you and me, it is likely that this number is significantly more with our use of social media.

 

Having access to an abundance of information should be incredibly advantageous, however, without proper organization of both old and new knowledge, our brains become overloaded, and productivity suffers.

 

Every time I introduce the second brain, I get students who believe the method is common sense, already have a note taking system in place, and are ready to tune me out. If this is you, I hope you give me another minute to explain the likely differences between your current framework and this one.

1) The second brain method facilitates many modes of collection in real time that can then be integrated into a singular ecosystem. Whether it's a voice recording, a photo, or a web article, you can capture the information on the go, ensuring valuable content is never lost.

2) After the information is put into the system, the second brain method offers robust organization and retrieval capabilities with the use of tags, links, and metadata, enabling easier access to your knowledge repository.

3) By automatically grouping similar information together, the system facilitates the cross-pollination of ideas and the discovery of patterns that might have otherwise been overlooked, ultimately leading to the generation of novel solutions.

There are an ample number of digital note taking platforms available that will help you take your note taking system to the next level, but some of my favorites that I would recommend are Evernote and Notability.