You will use a week of energy ratings to move your hardest work into the hours when you focus best.
Before you start, have three things in front of you: the energy ratings you took in lesson 7.3, the bedtimes you logged in lesson 7.1, and next week's plan from lesson 3.4, "Plan next week from start to finish". Set aside about 20 minutes. A week of energy ratings is just numbers until you do something with them. Once they're laid out in a grid with an average for each time slot, they show when you think best and when you're flat. You can then rewrite next week so deep work lands in your best hours and admin lands in your slump.
You can use paper or a spreadsheet. Put the days down the side, Monday to Friday, and your four rating times across the top. In each cell, write the rating you gave at that time on that day, on the scale of 1 to 5.
Add a bottom row for the average of each time slot. Add up the five ratings in the column and divide by five. If a rating is missing, divide by the number of ratings you actually have. A spreadsheet will do the averaging for you, and a calculator will do it in under a minute.
Where you can, mark any cell where something unusual happened, such as a bad night's sleep, a heavy lunch or a stressful meeting. These notes help you tell a pattern from a one-off when you read the grid later.
Priya (an invented example) rated her energy at 9am, 11am, 2pm and 4.30pm for a week. Her columns came out like this:
9am: 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, a total of 15 and an average of 3.0 11am: 4, 5, 4, 4, 4, a total of 21 and an average of 4.2 2pm: 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, a total of 12 and an average of 2.4 4.30pm: 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, a total of 14 and an average of 2.8
Your best focus windows are the time slots with the highest one or two averages. Your slump is the slot with the lowest average.
Priya's best window was clearly late morning, around 10am to noon. Her second-best was a toss-up between 9am and 4.30pm. She chose 9am because it was more consistent and less likely to be eaten up by end-of-day requests. Her slump was 2pm, after lunch. Her Friday 9am rating was 2, but she'd noted a late night on Thursday, so she didn't let that one score pull down her view of the morning.
Look at the individual days as well as the averages. Take a slot that averages 3.4 because it was 5 on three days and 1 on two days, and compare it with a slot that was 3 or 4 every day. The steady slot is more reliable, even when the averages are close, because you can count on it.
Check your notes for the low days. If the low ratings follow short sleep, say under six hours, the slot itself is probably good and the sleep caused the low score.
Treat the windows as approximate, because they only cover the times you rated. If your highest rating is at 11am, the real window may run roughly an hour either side, from about 10am to noon. You'll refine the edges over the next few weeks as you work in those hours and notice where your focus starts and fades.
Open next week's plan, either the one from lesson 3.4 or the one you're about to write in your weekly planning session, and go through it block by block.
Move your deep work blocks into your best windows. If a meeting sits in your best window and you have some say over it, ask to move it. If you have no say, accept it and use your second-best window that day.
Move admin, email and routine calls into your slump. The slump is also a good time for a walking meeting or a short break with movement, as covered in lesson 7.2.
If your best window turns out to be in the evening and your job doesn't let you work then, use your best daytime slot for deep work. You can keep the evening for learning or personal projects if you want to.
Priya moved her brief and her analytics work from 8.30am to 10am to noon. Her 2pm hour became her first inbox and Teams block of the afternoon, followed by expense claims and approvals.
Earlier in this module, in lessons 7.1 and 7.2, you set an evening cut-off for work messages and planned your breaks. Both now go into the plan.
Put the evening cut-off from lesson 7.1 on your calendar as a recurring event at the cut-off time on every working day. That way it shows up each evening as a boundary instead of staying a good intention.
Then check your bedtime log. If you averaged well under seven hours of sleep, look at what pushed bedtime late and add one change to the plan. An earlier cut-off on two nights is one option.
Add the planned breaks from lesson 7.2 as labelled blocks, the same as any other block in your calendar: short breaks after long focus blocks, and a lunch break away from your desk. Aim for at least two short breaks and a lunch break each day.
When you're done, you have a finished energy map: a grid of a week's ratings with the average for each time slot and your two best windows and your slump marked. It sits next to your revised weekly plan, which has deep work in your best windows, admin in your slump, at least two short breaks and a lunch break each day, and the evening cut-off on the calendar.
Keep rating your energy for a couple of days each month. Your patterns shift with the seasons, new roles and new routines, and the map is only useful while it reflects how your days actually run.
Start by laying out your grid and working out the averages for each slot.
Finish your energy map, then rewrite next week's time blocks so your deep work falls in your best windows.
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