A week of noticing when you have energy
Most people book demanding work for when it is convenient. This is a week of finding out when it is possible.
The short version
- Mark one letter, six times a day, for seven days. It takes about ten seconds each time.
- Filling it in pays where your week has any flexibility at all, and costs where every hour is already fixed by shifts or timetables — though even then the record is worth having when you next negotiate the shifts.
- This is not a test and it does not measure anything about you. It is a record of one week, and a week is a small sample.
Almost everyone schedules the hard thing for the gap in the diary. The gap is chosen because nothing else is in it, which is a fact about the timetable rather than a fact about the hour. Then the hour arrives, the work does not move, and the conclusion drawn is usually about the person rather than about the slot.
A week of marks is enough to test that. Most people who fill this in find at least one block they had written off — often early morning, often after nine at night — and at least one block they had been protecting for hard work that has been quietly returning nothing for months.
Do not change anything while you are recording. Live the week you were going to live, mark it as it happens, and read it on the eighth day. Marking it at the end of the day from memory produces a record of what you believe about your week, which is the thing you are trying to check.
The scale. Write one letter in each box. Nothing else goes in the boxes.
- H
- High — you could start something demanding right now
- M
- Middling — you could do routine or familiar work
- L
- Low — you could read something easy, or nothing
- X
- Asleep, or the block did not happen
| Block | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|
One thing to move
On the eighth day, read the grid and change one thing. Not the week — one thing. A single move that holds is worth more than a redesign that lasts four days.
If the good hours are not yours to spend
This is the common result, and it is not a personal failure. If your clearest block is nine to eleven in the morning and that is when the team meeting, the seminar and the shift all sit, no amount of rescheduling on your side will reach it.
The grid is useful here precisely because it is written down. A recurring meeting moved by ninety minutes, a seminar swapped for a later group, a shift pattern adjusted by one day, a deadline set at Tuesday noon rather than Monday nine — these are ordinary requests, and they land far better with a week of marks attached than with a description of how you feel. Ask for the smallest version: one recurring item, moved.
If nothing shifts after a few weeks of asking, that is useful information too, and it points at the timetable rather than at you.
Worth knowing. People underestimate how long their own tasks will take, even when they know they have done so before — Buehler, Griffin and Ross, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994. Self-prediction about our own working week is unreliable in a fairly consistent direction, which is the argument for recording a week rather than reasoning about one.
Evidence note. The specific idea that people have stable good and bad hours, and that matching demanding work to them helps, is widely described and often taught, but it is not settled research and we are not presenting it as one. Your grid is one week of your own observations, not a measurement. Seven days is a small sample, and illness, sleep and a hard week will all show up in it.
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Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.