Matching your tasks to your Energy

When considering how to best match your tasks to your energy it’s helpful to consider all the different kinds of work you do, and when would be the best time to do them. Even if you know that you’re naturally a morning person, for example, that alone may not help you best arrange all of your activities, since you can’t do everything first thing. Are you writing? editing? coding data? researching citations for a literature review? creating slides? preparing lecture notes for class? For each activity, consider when you would be best able to do that work well.

You might not know the answers to all those questions yet — so simply observing when you are intuitively drawn to do certain kinds of work, and how difficult or easy it is to complete the task at different times of day, can help you design your schedule to better match your tasks to your energy.

Natalie Houston writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed