Plan Energy, Not Time

Your head does not run at a steady setting. It runs in spikes and crashes.

Some hours feel sharp and fast, others feel like walking through mud with your eyes closed.

When you ignore that and try to copy a conventional schedule, you waste your best hours on the wrong work.

Most entrepreneurs keep cramming high-value work into their lowest-capacity hours. You sit in front of the screen, zone out, then blame yourself instead of your planning.

Stop trying to fit your brain into a schedule. Fit your schedule to your brain.

Get Actual Data

You cannot plan around your energy if you do not know what it looks like - "I am usually better in the morning" is not specific enough.

For one working week, track three things in the moment:

• What time you actually start working on something real

• How long you can focus before you hit a wall or reach for your phone

• The rough times of day when you feel sharp, flat or sleepy

Use whatever you already have: Notes app, paper notebook, shared doc.

Keep it simple so you actually do it.

At the end of five days, look for repeating peaks and troughs.

You might notice you are sharp from 9.30 to 11.00, crash around 2, then get a second wind at 4.

Plan the following week so your hardest thinking work sits in those peak slots. Everything else wraps around it.

MD already knew when her energy and focus were at their best. She just did not know how to build her week around that information. Once we mapped it out, she said:

"It made perfect sense... this is something I had thought about but not known how to do it." (MD, January 2026)

Empty Your Head First

Energy-aware planning fails if your head is full of unfinished admin, client pings and half-started projects. That noise eats any focus window you protect.

"I felt stuck. I had head clutter with lots of projects on the go. But to be honest hardly any of them were getting done. I was unfocused and procrastinating on things that were out of my comfort zone. I was letting myself get easily side-tracked and preferring to do other not so necessary jobs." (MD, January 2026)

When everything lives in your head, the urgent, the annoying and the genuinely important all feel the same size. You bounce between tabs, answer whatever shouts loudest and end the day tired with nothing finished.

To cut through that, get everything out first, then limit what comes into each day.

Step 1:
Dump everything Take one page or one screen and list every loose end: invoices, emails, content drafts, follow-ups, tech fixes, appointments.

Step 2:
Sort into three Once it is out, sort into:

• Urgent: time-sensitive or blocking money or clients

• To do: important but not time-critical

• Pending: waiting on someone else or not ready to tackle
  

Step 3:
Cap the daily load at three from the Urgent list. Pick the three tasks that matter most for this week's money, clients or delivery, not the three you feel like doing.

Then:

• Put each task into an actual slot in your calendar on one specific day

• Match them to your peak energy windows.

• Those are the only priority tasks for that day

If you do not finish one, it rolls to the next day and still counts as one of your three. You only add a new task when there is space.

What Actually Changes

This is not about becoming a perfect productivity machine. It is scaffolding for the days when your head will not cooperate.

After our meeting, MD started going to bed earlier and getting up earlier. She has not created her timetable yet but she has been more mindful of the time and stuck to the suggested slots as much as she can.

"I must say so far it's working and I've got more done.", (MD, January 2026)

That is what happens when you stop trying to force a schedule that does not fit your head. You do not need a perfect system. You need a simple one that respects your actual energy and makes it harder to waste your sharpest hours on tasks that do not matter.

Once you plan for the head you have, the work gets easier.