Almost 20 years ago, I stumbled across a Harvard Business Review article that completely flipped how I view productivity. It was Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy’s 2007 piece, “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time.“
Their core argument was simple but practical: Time is completely finite. You get 24 hours, and that’s it. Energy, however, is a renewable resource. I realized then that when you deliberately manage your focus and stamina, those same 24 hours yield entirely different results.
That single insight changed everything for me.
Here is how I applied the research.
First, I figured out my peak hours, that specific window of the day when my thinking is sharpest and my decisions are clearest. Second, I started protecting that window fiercely. I dedicated it solely to the work that matters most.
Running multiple businesses while being a mom among other things, means the demands on my time are constant, loud, and competing. The only way to stay ahead is to be ruthless. By giving my prime hours to high-level tasks, I can spend far less time executing them inside my peak window than if I tried forcing them at other times of the day.
I didn’t necessarily work less overall. Instead, I aligned my focus with my stamina.
Research completely backs this up. In 2014, Stanford economics professor John Pencavel proved that up to a point, working more hours produces more output. Beyond that threshold, each additional hour produces progressively less. In his study, the decline became particularly pronounced as weekly hours increased beyond roughly 48 hours. In other words, someone grinding for 70 hours may be producing roughly the same output as someone stopping at 50.
The issue here isn’t the extra hours themselves. It is a total lack of intentionality about which specific hours matter most.
Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, calls this “deep work” – distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their absolute limit.
While the HBR article laid the foundation and the Stanford data proved the operational cost of ignoring it, Newport finally gave the business world a vocabulary it would actually listen to. But the core truth remains unchanged across all three: your best work never comes from your longest days. It comes from your most focused hours.
Yet, most of us still treat our calendars like a game of Tetris. We pack the boxes, stay late, and assume a packed day equals a successful one. An ex-coworker of mine used to call this “movement but no progress.”
Think about where your best energy actually went last Wednesday. Was it spent on the heavy lifting—the strategy calls and the hard decisions that actually move the needle? Or did you burn your sharpest morning hours clearing out 35 mundane emails and scrolling through social media?
Here is my challenge to you this week:
- Block out your peak two hours.
- Put your most complex work right there and guard it ruthlessly.
- Let every other task slide into the other time of the day when your brain is half-offline anyway.
We don’t just have limited time. We have limited high-quality time, The question is: what are you spending yours on?
Now, let’s be honest. As a mom and an entrepreneur, I know firsthand that this won’t always work perfectly. Life happens. Kids get sick, emergencies pop up, and some mornings your peak energy just isn’t there. That’s okay. The goal is not a flawless schedule; the goal is intention. The fastest way to build momentum is simply by doing the work that matters most at your most productive time of the day – and trying to be as consistent as you can.
The fastest way to build momentum is by doing the work that matters most at your most productive time of the day, and doing it consistently.
Until the next note,
– STB
References:
- Schwartz, T. & McCarthy, C. (2007). Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time. Harvard Business Review
- Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. Stanford University / Stanford Institute for Economic Research
- Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing
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