You will use a week of energy ratings to move your most demanding work into your best hours.
A week of energy ratings is a page of numbers until you do something with it. This exercise turns those numbers into a map of your day, then uses the map to rewrite next week's plan so your hardest work lands in your best hours and your admin lands in the slump. It takes about 20 minutes, using the ratings from lesson 7.3, your bedtimes from lesson 7.1 and next week's plan from lesson 3.4.
Lay out your ratings in a grid on paper or in a spreadsheet. Put the days down the side, Monday to Friday, and your four rating times across the top. Fill in each cell with the rating you gave, from 1 to 5.
Then add a bottom row with the average for each time slot: add the five ratings in a column and divide by five. If you missed a rating, divide by the number you actually have. A spreadsheet will do this for you, and so will a calculator in under a minute.
If you can, mark the cells where something unusual happened, such as a bad night's sleep, a heavy lunch or a stressful meeting. Those notes help you tell a pattern from a one-off.
Look at the averages. The highest one or two are your best focus windows. The lowest is your slump.
Check the individual days as well as the averages. A slot that averages 3.4 because it was 5 on three days and 1 on two days is less reliable than one that was 3 or 4 every day. Look at your notes for the low days. If the 1s were both after nights you slept under six hours, the slot is probably good and the sleep was the problem.
Your windows are the times you rated, so they are approximate. If 11am is your highest rating, your real best window might be anywhere from about 10am to noon. You'll refine it over the next few weeks as you work in it.
Here are Priya's ratings, taken at 9am, 11am, 2pm and 4.30pm, as an example.
At 9am she rated 3, 3, 4, 3 and 2 across the week, which adds to 15 and averages 3.0. At 11am she rated 4, 5, 4, 4 and 4, adding to 21 for an average of 4.2. At 2pm she rated 2, 3, 2, 2 and 3, adding to 12 for an average of 2.4. At 4.30pm she rated 3, 3, 3, 2 and 3, adding to 14 for an average of 2.8.
Her best window was clearly late morning, around 10am to noon. Her second-best was a toss-up between 9am and 4.30pm, so she chose 9am, since it was more consistent and less likely to be eaten by end-of-day requests. Her slump was 2pm, after lunch. The Friday 9am rating of 2 came after a late night on Thursday, which she had noted, so she didn't let it drag her view of the morning down.
Open your weekly plan for next week, the one from lesson 3.4, Plan next week from start to finish, or the one you are about to write in your weekly planning session. Go through it block by block.
Move your deep work blocks into your best windows. For Priya, that meant moving the brief and the analytics work from 8.30am to 10am to noon. Where a meeting sits in your best window and you have some say over it, ask to move it. Where you don't, accept it and use your second-best window that day.
Move admin, email and routine calls into the slump. Priya's 2pm hour became her first inbox and Teams block of the afternoon, followed by expense claims and approvals. Your slump is also a good time for a walking meeting or a short break with movement, as in lesson 7.2.
If your best window is in the evening, and your job does not let you work then, use the best daytime slot you have, and keep the evening for learning or personal projects if you want to.
Two things from earlier in this module belong in the plan.
First, your evening cut-off for work messages from lesson 7.1. Put it on the calendar as a recurring event at the cut-off time, every working day, so it shows up as a boundary rather than a good intention. Check your bedtime log too. If you averaged well under seven hours of sleep, look at what pushed bedtime late and add one change to the plan, such as an earlier cut-off on two nights.
Second, your planned breaks from lesson 7.2: short breaks after long focus blocks, and a lunch break away from your desk. These go in as blocks with labels, the same as any other.
A finished energy map is a grid of a week's ratings with averages for each time slot, your two best windows and your slump marked on it. Next to it sits a revised weekly plan with deep work in the best windows, admin in the slump, at least two short breaks and a lunch break each day, and your evening cut-off on the calendar.
Keep rating your energy for a couple of days each month. Patterns shift with seasons, new roles and new routines, and the map is only useful while it's current. Start by laying out your grid and working out the averages for each slot.
Complete the energy map and rewrite next week's time blocks so deep work sits in your best windows.
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