How to Build a Workday That Actually Works for You

A lot of productivity advice sounds great in theory. Simply wake up early, time-block your entire day, tackle your hardest task first, answer emails in neat little batches, and whatever you do, do not get distracted. 

It’s all very impressive until you realize that some people find a tightly scheduled calendar calming, while others look at a day broken into 30-minute increments and immediately want to scream into the void.

Turns out, your energy levels, attention, working preferences, and even how you prefer to think can all play a role in how you work best. All of this means your most productive workday might not look anything like your coworker’s, your boss’s, your best friend’s, or that person on TikTok who somehow has 47 color-coded calendar blocks in one day.

So, instead of coaching you into another rigid routine to follow, we’re offering a new perspective: figure out the conditions that help you do your best work, and then start building more of them into your day.

To help us out, we spoke with Dr. Amantha Imber, Organisational Psychologist and host of the How I Work podcast, who studies productivity, innovation, and workplace wellbeing. As the founder of Inventium, Amantha has worked with companies including Google, Apple, Disney, LEGO, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft.

Here’s a potentially freeing thought: You don’t actually have to be good at everything everywhere all at once. We’re humans.

Maybe you’re brilliant at creative work in the morning but feel personally offended by the sight of a spreadsheet before lunch. Maybe you’re great in meetings after lunch but need the first few hours of the day to yourself. Maybe administrative tasks are oddly satisfying when your energy is lower.

Instead of simply asking, “When am I most productive?” start asking, “What kind of work feels easiest for my brain at different times of day?”

Dr. Amantha recommends turning this into a one-week experiment. For five workdays, check in with yourself three or four times throughout the day and jot down these observations:

• What time is it?
• What am I working on?
• How focused do I feel?
• How energized do I feel?
• Do I want collaboration right now, or do I want to work alone?
• What type of work feels easiest right now: creative thinking, deep-focus work, meetings/collaboration, or admin?

Don’t overthink it. This can take 30 seconds.

“By Day Five, you’ll usually see a clear pattern of when you’re best suited to deep work versus admin versus meetings,” Dr. Amantha says.

At the end of the week, look for patterns. You may start to see that you have a natural window for deep focus, another where you’re more social and collaborative, and another where answering emails suddenly feels considerably less offensive.

And once you know that, you can actually do something with it.

“Eat the frog” productivity advice has had a very good run, but Dr. Amantha isn’t convinced it’s a universal rule.

“I’d push back on ‘hardest thing first’ as a universal rule,” she says. “It only works if your hardest task also happens to land in your peak energy window.”

This is why your one-week experiment matters. Once you’ve started noticing your energy and the type of work you’re doing, don’t automatically organize your day from hardest task to easiest. Try matching the type of work to the window when your brain seems best suited for it.

Your highest-focus window might be perfect for writing, strategy, analysis, or anything that requires sustained concentration. A more social window might be better for meetings and collaboration. Your lower-energy stretch might be the ideal time to answer emails, update spreadsheets, or knock out administrative tasks.

And there’s no need for negative self-talk. Discovering that you’re not producing your most brilliant creative work at 4:00 p.m. doesn’t mean you’re “not creative.” Maybe 4:00 p.m. is simply when you should answer the emails you’ve been avoiding.

For anyone whose phone has somehow become an extension of their hand, hi.

When you’re struggling to focus, the answer isn’t always to summon more discipline from the productivity gods. Sometimes you just have to make distraction slightly more annoying.

“Removing the decision to check your phone matters more than willpower ever will,” Amantha says. Her wonderfully unglamorous advice: Put your phone in another room, silence the pings, choose one task, and set a timer.

“Twenty minutes of ‘just this’ beats an afternoon of switching between six half-finished things.”

Research on task switching has also found costs associated with moving between cognitive tasks, which helps explain why bouncing constantly from one thing to another may make it harder to stay locked in.

It’s something we probably know deep down but keep lying about it to ourselves. So, stop that.

This is also where the Pomodoro Technique can be useful. Traditionally, it uses 25 minutes of focused work, followed by a five-minute break. But we don’t need to get precious about 25 minutes.

Try 20. Try 30. Try 45 if you’re already in the zone—hallelujah!

The point isn’t to find a magic number. It’s to replace the “I need to focus for the next three hours” with, “For the next 20 minutes, I’m doing this one thing.”

You can also experiment with batching similar work together. Instead of writing for 20 minutes, checking email, answering Slack, jumping into a spreadsheet, and then trying to remember what you were writing about, group similar tasks together when you can.

Your brain has enough tabs open already.

This doesn’t mean you should forgo the to-do list altogether. But there’s a difference between remembering everything you need to do and needing to think about everything you need to do right now.

Research by Masicampo and Baumeister found that unfinished goals can continue to intrude on our thoughts, while making specific plans for those unfinished goals reduced those cognitive effects.

Basically, your brain keeps reminding you about the thing you haven’t done because it doesn’t know when, exactly, you’re going to do it.

So try giving it an answer.

Instead of keeping a giant list of vague tasks staring you down all day, week, year, the remainder of your life … experiment with a two-level system:

1. Your master list – Everything that needs to happen eventually.
2. Your today list – The smaller number of things you’re actually committing to today.

Then make vague tasks more specific.

Instead of:

Try:

• Tuesday, 10:00–11:00 a.m.: Draft slides 1–5

Instead of:

Try:

• Thursday, 2:00 p.m.: Review five outstanding invoices

The research doesn’t tell us that a master-list/today-list system is the one perfect way to organize your life. The point is to experiment with getting unfinished tasks out of your head and giving the important ones a more specific plan.

Some people think by talking. Others need to let an idea marinate before they have anything useful to say. If you’ve ever left a meeting only to think of the perfect response 20 minutes later, this one may sound familiar.

“If you’re energised by other people, working through a problem out loud in a group can help you think,” Dr. Amantha says. “If you need solo focus, being handed material to pre-read and having processing time before a meeting will get far better input from you than being put on the spot in the room.”

There’s research to support the idea that a little preparation can change how people participate. A large Microsoft Research study found that pre-meeting communication was associated with meeting effectiveness, inclusiveness, participation, and contributor comfort.

So, if you know you need processing time, stop treating it like a character flaw and start building it into the way you work.

Have a presentation where you’re expected to give feedback? Ask if you can get the deck an hour before the call. Going into a big brainstorm? Read the brief beforehand. Put on the spot and don’t have a thoughtful answer yet? 

Try this: 

“I do my best thinking once I’ve had a little time to process. Let me think through this and come back to you this afternoon with some bullet points.”

No one can hold that against you. And your processing style may also change how you brainstorm.

Productivity plot twist alert: 

The classic group brainstorm isn’t necessarily the best way to get everyone’s best ideas, despite what they depict in the movies. You know the scene—everyone starts shouting pure-gold ideas at whoever is heading the room, maniacally writing on a whiteboard.

Research on group ideation has identified something called “production blocking,” which can happen when everyone has ideas but only one person can talk at a time. While you’re waiting for your turn, you’re also listening, trying to remember your own idea, and processing what everyone else is saying. Research suggests that combining individual idea generation with group collaboration can help address some of the limitations of traditional group brainstorming.

So try an experiment at your next brainstorm: Give everyone 10 to 15 minutes to generate ideas independently before the group discussion starts. Then come together and compare notes.

Maybe you discover that you generate your best ideas alone and improve them collaboratively. Maybe talking is what gets your brain going in the first place.

Again, we’re collecting clues.

Knowing how you work also means knowing when your brain is done working for a minute.

When you’ve hit a wall, there’s a temptation to take a “break” that involves opening Instagram, checking your texts, playing today’s Wordle, and somehow ending up 25 minutes deep into a completely unrelated internet rabbit hole.

Dr. Amantha recommends something more restorative—changing your environment or taking a short walk.

“A short walk or a change of environment works because it’s a genuine break from the task, not a different flavour of the same stimulation,” she says.

It makes sense. Don’t take a break from screen time just to hit some other screen time.

Research backs up the general idea that breaks can still be worthwhile. A meta-analysis of 22 independent study samples found that micro-breaks were associated with increased vigor and reduced fatigue. The overall effect on performance wasn’t statistically significant, and longer breaks (over 10 minutes) were associated with greater performance improvements, so your five-minute break doesn’t need to magically make you better at your job.

Get up. Move around. Refill your water. Step outside. Look away from your screen.

Or just take the break because you deserve to live.

The goal here isn’t to diagnose yourself as a “morning person,” an “introvert,” a “creative,” or someone who needs a color-coded calendar to feel like a viable, employable human being.

You don’t need to hack your chronotype or assign yourself another label. Just get to know yourself in this way.

Maybe you discover that you do your clearest thinking before noon. Maybe you realize you need processing time before big meetings. Maybe your best ideas come when you generate them alone before bringing them to a group. Maybe 20 minutes of focused work feels infinitely more approachable than an amorphous three-hour work block.

The best part? None of these discoveries require a massive life overhaul.

Move one meeting. Ask for the deck ahead of time. Protect an hour for deep work. Try 20 minutes without your phone. Give that vague task a specific time and scope. Take your lunch break away from your laptop.

Pay attention to what changes.

Your best workday doesn’t need to resemble anyone else’s. It just needs to give your brain more of the conditions that help you think, focus, collaborate, and get your work done without constantly fighting against yourself.