Today's Good Life project riff is entitled how to find your peak creation windows.
So damned if this stuff doesn't work.
I've been studying the relationship between natural attention and cognition cycles, creativity and productivity for years now.
I know the data, but being the classic cobbler's kid never really took the time to pay serious attention to my own organic attention and cognition, meaning thinking cycles, and then shift my working effort efforts to leverage these rhythms rather than war against them.
And that's been a big honking mistake coming home from a whole bunch of travels.
It really led to a lot of rethinking because that tends to jar my schedule and I need to sort of recommit to doing things right.
So I decided to really spend a few months completely retooling my own life optimization and work and creation process through a series of experiments.
One of the first ones was paying attention to what times of day I'm most organically creative and productive identifying when kick ass stuff literally cascades out of me, and also when I can't drum up a half decent thought or sentence or line or image to save my life.
Within a few days, I pretty much verified what I intuitively knew but didn't always do.
Mornings are peak creation times for me, and actually the research shows for many people, three to five ish, not so much.
And I have an evening creation cycle that could potentially be insanely productive, except that it completely conflicts with my desire to be present with my family.
So I picked up on this when I was working on my last book, and I started to structure my days to leverage these windows to create huge amounts of content in a very short window of time.
But once the book was in, I drifted away from that schedule.
I'd still roll out of bed and meditate, hang out with the wife and kiddo for a bit, and then move my body in the morning.
But then, without being deliberate about it, I'd spend the next three to 4 hours on email and social media and phone calls and the other yada yada stuff.
That is an awful, terrible, no good decision by default.
Using peak creation cycles for email stifles innovation, performance and progress.
I was inadvertently doing maintenance and production work during the window where I should have been in hardcore creation mode.
By the time I'd roll into late morning early afternoon, my organic hyper creative window was cycling down and I had nothing left to do the work that makes me come alive and that people most value malaise would set in.
I'd find it harder and harder to come up with ideas or posts or podcasts or creations or art and solutions when my day was structured this way.