Tracking productivity can reveal useful patterns, but sometimes a new idea changes the entire approach. For the source author, Willian Molinari, Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing prompted a shift from organizing hours to organizing energy.
Not everyone controls their working hours. Even within a traditional 9-to-5 job, however, matching tasks to fluctuations in alertness can help make work more productive and leave more room for rest.
Why biological rhythms matter at work
In When, Pink examines research on how timing affects decisions, behavior, and performance. The findings extend well beyond ordinary afternoon tiredness:
- Judges ruled in prisoners’ favor about 65% of the time early in the day, with that rate falling to nearly zero by late morning, regardless of case details.
- CEOs used more negative and irritable language during afternoon earnings calls than morning calls, irrespective of the underlying financial results.
- During afternoons in healthcare settings, handwashing became less likely and unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions more likely. Endoscopists also found half as many polyps in afternoon colonoscopies as in morning procedures.
The studies discussed suggest that task timing accounts for 20% of performance variance. The source also describes afternoon performance as 20% worse than morning performance on the same task, all else being equal—with night owls as an exception. Pink’s broader point is that timing is not the only influence, but it is a substantial one.
Although the book considers events ranging from colonoscopies to marriage, its most relevant lessons for daily work concern two things: when to tackle tasks and when to stop for a break.
Understand your daily energy cycle
Eighty percent of people follow a broadly similar pattern: mood and energy rise in the morning, fall in the afternoon, and recover somewhat in the late afternoon or evening. This group includes morning larks and third birds. Third birds follow the larks’ pattern, but 1-3 hours later.
The other twenty percent are night owls. Their pattern is reversed and shifted later: moderately high energy in the early afternoon, a low in the early evening, and their strongest energy late at night and into the early morning.
Energy-pattern graphic attribution: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
Pink calls the three stages the peak, trough, and rebound. Each suits a different kind of work.
Peak: protect your concentration
At your peak, energy and focus are strongest. Reserve this period for analytical tasks that demand concentration and vigilance: a programmer might tackle difficult code, while a writer might draft or edit.
Keep routine work from consuming these hours wherever possible. This is the time to protect for demanding, high-impact tasks.
Trough: handle routine work or recharge
The trough brings low energy, fatigue, and difficulty focusing—the familiar afternoon slump for morning larks. Pushing through demanding work can increase frustration and mental exhaustion.
Instead, use this period for necessary tasks whose completion matters more than fine distinctions in quality, such as processing email or submitting expenses. It is also a suitable time to step outside, meet a friend for coffee, or take a short nap.
Rebound: make room for ideas
During the rebound, concentration returns without reaching peak sharpness. Research described in the book places people’s strongest creativity in this period, making it useful for insight rather than simply a slower version of peak work.
Writers might brainstorm topics, reconsider a difficult chapter, or review notes for ideas. Programmers could revisit an unresolved problem, explore developments in their field, or learn through a side project.
Choose work according to energy
This pattern helps explain why accomplished violinists practice heavily in the morning, rest in the afternoon, and return for more practice in the evening. They use their strongest hours and recover during weaker ones.
Task-matching graphic attribution: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
Thinking in terms of peak, trough, and rebound changes how you assess a request. A proposed 9am meeting, an email awaiting a reply, or a brainstorming session each competes for a different kind of attention. Rather than filling peak hours with meetings and leaving difficult work for the trough, block those hours for your most important tasks.
Use breaks to restore attention
Molinari initially doubted that taking time away could improve productivity. Yet research repeatedly finds that breaks restore focus and motivation, support memory and learning, and encourage creativity. They become particularly valuable when important work must happen during a trough.
Pink groups useful breaks into five categories.
Micro breaks
Brief pauses give your eyes and body a rest:
- Use the 20-20-20 approach: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away—a little over six meters—for 20 seconds.
- Choose a smaller water bottle so refilling it requires occasional walks.
- Stand and stretch for 60 seconds.
Movement breaks
Movement helps counter the negative effects of sitting:
- Walk for five minutes each hour.
- If yoga appeals to you, search for “office yoga”.
- Pause for push-ups, doing as many as your available energy allows rather than aiming for a prescribed number.
Nature breaks
Walking in natural surroundings has beneficial effects on the brain. Visit a nearby park, walk your dog, or spend time outside where there are trees and a bench.
Social breaks
Social connection has a positive association with health and productivity.
- Contact someone by email, phone, or a brief visit. Thanking a person who helped you can be pleasant for them and restorative for you.
- Arrange coffee or a walk with a colleague whose company you enjoy.
Mental gear-shifting breaks
When you feel overwhelmed or unable to concentrate, changing mental gears may help:
- Try meditation. A long session is unnecessary; UCLA offers guided sessions as short as three minutes.
- Practice controlled breathing for 45 seconds: breathe deeply so your belly expands, pause, then exhale slowly to a count of five. Repeat four times. This technique reduces stress and helps sharpen thinking.
As a general rule, stepping away from screens is more refreshing than staying on them. The more fully you disengage from work, the more restorative the pause can be.
Plan a restorative nap
A workday nap is not possible for everyone. Where it is practical, the right timing and duration can help you move out of a trough and into a more productive rebound.
- Identify your daily energy low, which should occur at roughly the same time each day, and plan your nap around it.
- Choose somewhere peaceful, ideally dark and quiet.
- Drink a cup of a caffeinated beverage beforehand. Caffeine takes about 25 minutes to reach the bloodstream, so its effects should begin around waking time.
- Set a timer for about 25 minutes. Between 20 and 30 minutes appears ideal: longer than 30 minutes risks grogginess as the body prepares for deeper sleep, while less than twenty minutes may not deliver the full benefit.
- Take the break without guilt.
Find your own peak, trough, and rebound
Other people’s routines can provide ideas, but your own rhythms require observation. Pink’s Daily When Tracker offers a way to record energy and alertness.
Get the Daily When Tracker, then set a timer to ring every 90 minutes. At each prompt, mark a number from 1 to 10 reflecting how energetic or mentally alert you feel.
Molinari printed the tracker and used it for a week. His results closely followed the third-bird pattern: peak alertness between 8 am and noon, a trough between 1 pm and 4 pm, and a rebound between 5:30pm and 8:30pm.
Even if you think you know your strongest hours, a week of tracking may confirm—or challenge—that impression. Molinari also found it useful for recognizing how each stage felt physically and mentally, making it easier to judge when to concentrate and when to step away.
Turn your energy pattern into a Todoist schedule
After at least a week of tracking, use your approximate energy cycle and growing awareness of its physical signals to organize work.
Label tasks by their energy demands
Begin by sorting tasks into these categories:
- Peak: analytical work requiring focus and vigilance.
- Rebound: insight-driven work requiring focus and creativity.
- Trough: necessary work that needs little focus or attention.
Molinari uses Todoist labels named “peak”, “rebound”, and “trough”. Alternatives include “high energy” and “low energy”, or visual labels such as 🔥, 😪, and 💡. He recommends assigning different colors so the categories stand out.
Create a label for each energy level. To apply one, type @ in the task field to display available labels, then continue typing its name to narrow the results. Clicking a label or searching for it in the Quick Find bar displays matching tasks from all projects.
Create energy-specific filters
Custom filters can restrict each category to work that needs attention today. The query @peak & (today | overdue), for example, displays “peak” tasks due today or overdue.
Create a “Today” filter view for each energy level using equivalent queries for trough and rebound tasks. Add the filters to favorites for easy access, then open the view that matches your current energy.
Put breaks on the task list
Create a separate Breaks project and schedule restorative activities as you would other important work. Molinari’s example is a recurring task entered as Walk outside with the dog every workday at 2pm @trough, reminding him to leave his desk during low-energy hours.
Give these tasks genuine priority: their purpose is to support productivity and health, not to become another source of guilt.
Look for weekly themes
Tracking for several weeks may reveal that some days consistently bring more energy, focus, or creativity than others. If that happens, consider day theming: analytical work early in the week, meetings on Thursdays, or creative and learning work on Fridays, for example.
The free Skillshare course from productivity expert Mike Vardy explains how to build a day-theming system, with detailed examples using paper and Todoist.
What different chronotypes look like in practice
Molinari’s third-bird routine
The source author describes this as a favorable version of his day, rather than a schedule he can always maintain:
- 6:00 am: While the household sleeps, he opens his Peak today filter and starts the highest-priority task. Todoist’s async-first communication usually allows 2 uninterrupted hours before family routines begin.
- 9:00-10:00 am: Returning to work, he prioritizes collaboration and questions for colleagues because of the time difference between South America and Europe. If time remains before lunch, he fits in more deep work.
- 1:00 pm: His post-lunch trough is devoted to the Trough today filter: email, Twist replies, code reviews, and smaller necessary tasks.
- 3:00 pm: He aims to walk his dog around this time. More recently, a nearby friend has joined him for a 30-minute afternoon walk once a week, combining movement, nature, and social contact.
- 5:00 pm: As energy returns, he opens Rebound today, checks his time tracker to avoid overworking, and attempts another focused session. This is the least consistent part of the routine: tasks often resemble his peak work, and home life is less predictable.
A night owl’s routine
Todoist CTO Gonçalo illustrates a different chronotype. His ideal schedule looks like this:
- 12:00 pm: Wake and get ready.
- 1:00 pm: Have lunch.
- 2:00 pm: Begin work with rebound tasks.
- 4:00 PM: Shift into trough activities, including Twist, email, meetings, and helping others move forward.
- 5:00-6:00 pm: Disconnect for errands and family time.
- 10:00 pm: Start deep work as energy rises, continuing through the quiet night until 3 AM, his peak period.
Family responsibilities complicate that ideal. Taking his toddler to school every morning prevents Gonçalo from consistently following it. Within a more conventional schedule, mornings become his trough, afternoons combine peak and rebound, and he fits a couple of peak hours into the evening. The timing changes, but matching work to energy remains the aim.
Keep your schedule flexible enough for real life
A tightly controlled day is rarely realistic, and attachment to a perfect routine can make disruptions harder to absorb. As the father of 8-month old twins, Molinari describes a much less predictable life than he had 10 months earlier, when mornings could reliably hold deep work and late mornings accommodated teammates in other time zones.
Losing peak time to an interruption is frustrating, but it need not spoil the rest of the day.
Leave margin in the day
A schedule filled to capacity is vulnerable to small delays. Buffer space helps prevent one interruption from becoming a day of stress and falling behind.
Start with meetings, often the least flexible commitments. Review them—especially recurring ones—to decide whether they serve a clear purpose or could become asynchronous written discussions. The source also suggests using a meeting-decision flowchart. Where meetings are necessary, place them outside peak hours if possible, or group them on a themed day.
Another approach is to narrow your definition of a productive day. Choose a single Most Important Thing, also called the Eat the Frog method: one clearly defined task achievable in 1-2 hours that would make the day worthwhile. Do it first during your peak. You may accomplish more, but if plans unravel, that essential work still counts.
Use structure when you must work through a trough
Lower-energy hours do not make focused work impossible. When demanding tasks cannot wait, use restorative breaks to support alertness, divide large jobs into smaller subtasks, and consider the Pomodoro Technique: work for 25 minutes, pause for 5 minutes, and take a longer 30-minute break after every 4 sprints.
The goal is a workable schedule, not flawless adherence to ideal timing.
What the author’s tracking showed
Molinari examined his productivity data to see whether anything changed after he began scheduling around energy in 2019. His RescueTime “productivity pulse” showed small improvements, while deep-work hours recorded manually in Toggl became somewhat more consistent in 2019 than in earlier years. Completed Todoist tasks doubled between 2017 and 2019.
He presents these as encouraging observations, not definitive evidence that energy-based scheduling caused the changes.
The benefit he valued most was less measurable: working with his biological rhythms instead of fighting them. He began going to the gym around 1pm rather than forcing unproductive work, enjoyed the midday personal time without guilt, and returned feeling more energetic and ready to focus.
For him, Pink’s book reframed low-productivity periods as a normal part of being human. Rest became a way to return with greater energy, and the search for one perfect routine gave way to finding a schedule that suited his own life.
Source author: Willian. Author publication: technical book in pt-BR.
