You only have 3-4 hours of productive work per day.

While it’s possible to sit at your desk for eight hours, the quality of your work reaches a point of diminishing returns after 3-4 hours. This is because cognitively demanding tasks—those requiring deep thinking, problem-solving, and creativity—consume a lot of mental energy. And once depleted, your ability to perform these tasks effectively drops sharply. Paying attention to your peak productivity hours ensures that you make progress on what matters most to your career.

Analyse your working day

Pay attention to the time of day when you feel like you’re working at your cognitive peak and then protect that time to focus on your highest-value, most important work. For some, this might be first thing in the morning before the day’s distractions set in. For others, it could be the mid-afternoon or even late at night when everyone else is asleep.

Read: Fixed schedule productivity.

The key is to find the time when you feel at your best and allocate that time to your high-value work.

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world.

Practical strategies

1. Track your energy levels: Spend a week tracking your energy and focus levels at different times of the day. Note when you feel most productive and when your concentration wanes.
2. Prioritise your tasks: Make a list of tasks and categorise them by the level of cognitive demand. Assign high-demand tasks to your peak performance periods and reserve lower-demand tasks, like responding to emails or administrative work, for when your energy levels are lower.
3. Create a routine: Establishing a consistent daily routine that aligns with your natural rhythms can help reinforce this practice. Start your day with your most challenging tasks and move to less demanding activities as your cognitive energy declines.
4. Take breaks: Cognitive work is intense and requires regular breaks to maintain high levels of performance. Short breaks between tasks can help rejuvenate your mind and sustain productivity during the limited time you have.
5. Protect your peak times: Once you’ve identified your peak times, guard them diligently. Avoid scheduling meetings or engaging in non-essential activities during these periods.

Read: Batching meetings together.

When you know that you’ve allocated a period of time for high-value work, it’s easier to then devote the rest of your day to administrative work, teaching preparation, meetings, and other important but less cognitively demanding activities.

By separating your day into focused, peak productivity hours and more open-ended hours, you’ll be able to get more high-impact work done.