Most productivity advice ignores chronotype, your biological timing pattern. About 15% of people are morning types, 20% are evening types, and two-thirds fall in between. Match your natural rhythm to your work: analytical tasks in the morning, routine work in the afternoon slump, creative work later.
A lot of the productivity advice that we get assumes that you're just like everyone else, and that's a problem because it's not true. It assumes that you can write a bunch of emails or make a presentation just as effectively at 10 AM as at 6 PM. You have to match up your type, your task, and your time. By type, I mean chronotype. That's a word that chronobiologists use to describe our natural tendencies. About 15% of us, very strong morning people. Larks. About 20% of us, very strong evening people, owls. About 2/3 of us in the middle. Here's how to figure out your chronotype. Think about a day where you have full control over your schedule. It's what's called a free day. On a free day, what time would you typically go to sleep? You have night owls, who have it very tough out there, and everybody else. About 80% of us have a chronotype that follows a particular pattern. Now, here's what we know about that pattern: a peak early in the day, a trough in the middle of the day, and a recovery later in the day. And what you need to do is you need to figure out the right tasks for the right time. Here's how to do it. Do your analytic, heads-down, focused work early in the day. Do your administrative work during that trough period in the early to mid-afternoon. And do your more creative, conceptual, iterative work later in the day.
