We track most of our lives through calendars. At least we've learned to do so thanks to work conditioning. We count hours, stack meetings, block time for deep work, and assume that managing time is managing productivity. But time is a lazy metric. A full Sunday can pass with nothing meaningful done. You'd have the time but didn't feel like doing anything because of low energy. Sometime, a single focused hour on a random weekday night can move an idea ten steps forward. That’s because time only measures availability; energy ensures possibility.
Time can be borrowed, delegated, or extended. Energy can’t. It tells you exactly when you’re capable of doing good work (and when you’re pretending).
People treat burnout as a time-scheduling problem, but it’s actually an energy problem. Even when you technically have hours left in the day, you can’t always think, decide, or care. Because energy fuels every kind of output. Be it physical, emotional, cognitive, or creative.
When one of these tanks runs low, the others start compensating until everything collapses. Time management systems ignore that interplay. They assume that 9 AM on Monday is the same as 9 AM on Friday. It isn’t. We actually run on fluctuating batteries, not fixed clocks.
A few years ago, I logged my energy for a few days thanks to a random YouTube video where I was trying to map tasks with physical space of doing that task with the device I'd do that task on. I noted my energy every two or three hours (high, medium, or low) and what I was doing at that moment. The result looked roughly something like this:
7-9 AM: Calm, focused, read a book, worked out
9-11 AM: High energy
11-1 PM: Slight dip, get done with meetings
2-4 PM: Low, avoid meetings
4-6 PM: Recovering, calm, do reviews
6-8 PM: Emotionally high, good for family
That log became a better guiding compass than Google calendar.
Every traditional productivity method assumes energy uniformity. A low-energy hour can feel like ten, while a high-energy one disappears in minutes yet produces ten times the output. That’s why people say “I don’t know where the time went” after a flow state. It was energy that matched your intended purpose. A calendar is a mechanical object; energy is biological. The intersection of both is where good work happens.
It's quite simple to build the calendar and your to-dos on reminders. First thing to do is identify and log your energy. Log it anywhere and it should look like the bullet list above. Do it for about a week.
When your energy is high, you are sharp, clear, and focused. Use these hours to build things. They’re rare, so they must be protected. These are your creation hours, the moments for designing, writing, problem-solving, or learning something complex. I’ve noticed that for me, this window often sits in the quiet mornings at work or in no-meeting stretches when nobody expects a reply. I can also do high-energy work when I’m preparing a presentation or writing a pitch. Basically, anything that needs both precision and performance. Late nights don't work.
Medium energy is when you're alert but not razor sharp, more social than analytical. This is when collaborative work like brainstorms, 1:1s, design reviews, and cross-functional discussions fit best. It’s not your best time to create, but it’s a good time to connect. For me, this usually sits between mid-day and early evening. Scheduling meetings here keeps my mornings clean for deep work and lets me engage better with people later in the day.
Low energy is when the mind is dull but the hands can still move. It’s perfect for low-risk, mechanical work like Slack, emails, documentation, bills, errands, grocery lists, calendar cleanup, or passive learning. These tasks just require presence. I often batch them for that strange post-lunch hour when focus dips often. You can’t think well then, but you can still act, and that keeps momentum alive. What matters is to never waste high-energy windows on this kind of work.
Then there’s emotional energy. For me, this peaks in the evenings, after the day’s intensity has softened. That’s when I connect with family, talk to my team about non-work things, or check in with friends. Emotional energy shouldn’t be squeezed into the gaps of other energies; it deserves its own protected hours, because relationships gets maintained here.
The goal is to move one thing at a time. Over time, your schedule starts resembling your biology.
The simplest way to build this loop is to keep tools stupidly simple. Use what you already open every day. In Apple Reminders, tag tasks as #HighEnergy or #LowEnergy and log quick entries through Siri (“3 PM low → walk”). In Google Calendar, colour-code blocks: green for deep work, blue for collaboration, grey for admin, yellow for recovery. In Notes, reflect weekly on what work matched your best energy, what didn’t, and why.
Once you start planning by energy, start designing your days around energy, not time. You'll do deep work when your mind is sharp, calls when your empathy peaks, workouts when your body dips, family time when emotional energy rises. The shift is subtle but almost permanent.
Cheers!