Weekly Wisdom #340 - Your best hours are getting wasted

Energy Management, Outlive, The Corporate Athlete & Working Smarter

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Happy Sunday!

I used to think productivity was about squeezing more into the day.

Wake up earlier. Batch tasks. Block every hour. Fill the gaps.

It worked, kind of. I got things done. But the quality was uneven. Some days I’d write something in an hour that would’ve taken me four the day before. Other days I’d stare at the same paragraph for 45 minutes and produce nothing useful.

The variable wasn’t effort. It was energy.

I started paying attention to when I actually do good work versus when I just go through the motions. Turns out there’s a pretty clear pattern. My best thinking happens before noon. Afternoons are for calls, admin, anything that doesn’t require deep focus. Evenings are for reading, or nothing.

There’s research behind this. Our bodies run on roughly 90-minute cycles — ultradian rhythms. You get about 90 minutes of focused capacity, then you need a break. Push through and you’re not working harder, you’re just working worse.

Peter Attia talks about something related in Outlive. His frame is longevity, but the underlying point applies: your body isn’t a machine you can override indefinitely. How you treat it determines what it can do for you. Sleep, exercise, nutrition — they’re not separate from your work performance. They are your work performance.

I’ve been testing this more deliberately lately. Protecting mornings for the hardest problems. Not scheduling meetings before 11. Going for a walk when I hit the wall at 2pm instead of grabbing another coffee and pushing through.

The results aren’t dramatic in any single day. But over a week, the difference is real. I’m finishing important things earlier, and the late-afternoon scramble has mostly disappeared.

The counterintuitive move isn’t doing more. It’s doing less at the right time.

When do you do your best work? Are you protecting that time?

Have a great week!

Graham

📚 Book Notes: Outlive — Peter Attia​

Attia’s book is about living longer and better. The framework: think of your health in terms of “healthspan” not just lifespan. What good is living to 90 if the last 20 years are miserable?

What stuck with me is how much of what we think of as aging is actually deconditioning. Losing muscle, flexibility, cardiovascular fitness — not because you’re old, but because you stopped using them.

The connection to energy management: if your body is a wreck, no productivity system is going to save you. Sleep, movement, and nutrition aren’t wellness luxuries. They’re the foundation that everything else sits on.

📖 Article: The Power of Full Engagement — HBR summary​

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz originally wrote this for Harvard Business Review, arguing that managing energy — not time — is the key to sustained performance. They studied elite athletes and found that what separated the best wasn’t talent or hours of practice. It was how deliberately they recovered between efforts.

The same applies to knowledge work. Most people try to sprint for 8 hours straight, then wonder why they’re fried by 3pm. The alternative: work in focused bursts, rest deliberately, and treat your energy like the finite resource it is. Sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it.

From the Blog

📝 Memory and Task Systems: Giving Your AI Agent a Brain — I built my AI system to handle the low-energy tasks so my high-energy hours stay clear. The idea: automate the admin, protect the focus time.

📝 How I’m Vibe Coding in 2026 — My workflow depends on long uninterrupted sessions with AI tools. One meeting in the middle of a build session and the momentum’s gone.

📣 Quote

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.” — Seneca