78. Are You Wasting Your Peak Energy Time on Low Value Tasks? Find Your Chronotype Peak Zone and 4X Your Productivity

00:05 Dr. Ann Tsung Are you struggling to advance your career and sacrificing time with your loved ones because of endless to-dos, low energy, and just not enough time in the day? If so, then this podcast is for you. I am your host Dr. Ann Tsung, an ER critical care and space doctor, a peak performance coach, a real estate investor, and a mother of a toddler. I am here to guide you on mastering your mind and give you the essential skills to achieve peak performance. Welcome to Productivity MD, where you can learn to master your time and achieve the five freedoms in life.

00:52 Hello. Welcome to Productivity MD show, and I am your show host Dr. Ann Tsung. Today, I’m going to be talking about mastering your energy arbitrage. So what does that mean? It’s understanding your chronotype when you are at your best, your peak chronotype zone for work, and when you’re at your trough, and making sure that you’re aligning your activities, your work, your recovery activities to your biology, your natural physiology—working with your physiology and biology instead of against it. And it’s super important. Because a lot of times, you can actually get four times more productive if you are working in your peak biological zone, right? So a lot of us can feel like, in the afternoons, if you’re trying to do deep work, create something, learning something, you’re super slow. You have food coma, and you’re basically 25% more effective than you were earlier in the morning, right, when there’s like minimal distractions. So we can understand that.

01:54 The most common mistake, the reason why we’re talking about this is, the most common mistake I see is that there is a mismatch in terms of what they’re scheduling in their peak mental performance zone. Right? They’re doing low-value task in the peak zone. But the stuff that requires deep work—like working on your business, creating something, writing something, creating a slideshow perhaps, or learning something like a medical article, for me—we’re doing it at our trough, in our trough, which doesn’t make any sense, right? Or a lot of us are waking up during our peak zone. We’re doing things for recovery instead. So we’re working out. We’re meditating. We’re doing breathwork. We’re journaling. We’re doing that for an hour or two, and then we dive into work. So I think, for those people, we’ll talk a little bit about it. It actually should be the other way around so that you can actually put in another flow block. So we’ll go ahead and dive into, you know. That was a little bit about the why, why we care so much about this.

02:58 You know, in the prior episode, we talked about creating a life vision, having a wheel of life. If you didn’t listen to it yet, go listen to it because it’s important now about how you’re going to structure your day with that life vision, wheel of life, and your five goals for the year. Now, you put down in your calendar the action steps that you will be taking the next week, the next month, to take you towards the five goals. But it’s got to match your chronotype.

03:25 So how do you determine your chronotype? So imagine when you are at the time with no obligations, no work obligations. Imagine no kids, no caffeine whatsoever. Just think about the time where you would ideally like to go to sleep and wake up. So take the midpoint of that time. If the midpoint of that time is before 3:30 AM, then you are a lark. If it’s between 3:30 AM and 5:30 AM, you’re a third bird, which more than half of the people are third birds. And if the midpoint of your natural sleep is later than 5:30 AM, then you are an owl. So, for example, I usually like to go to bed—preferably if I have my choice—probably will be like 10 to 7, 10 to 8 or so, right? So if it is 10 to 7, or let’s say 10 to 6 for simplicity, right, if it is 10 to 6, that’s what I like to sleep, then ideally, the midpoint of my sleep is 2 AM. If it is 2 AM, before 3:30 AM, then I’m a lark. Because of kids, I have to shift my sleep a little bit earlier. Because if you’re a lark, your peak zone is actually from 6 AM to 9 AM, right? That’s when you will ideally like to work—from 6 AM to 9 AM. But I would like to get a little bit more done before the kids wake up at 7. So in order to shift just a little bit earlier, like an even earlier lark, then I would like to go to bed like 9. 9:30. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it doesn’t. Then I actually wake up around five-ish, so I can maybe start even earlier than 6:00.

05:14 So, anyway, for those of you guys who are a lark, then your peak chronotype zone is from 6 AM to 9 AM. During that period of time, you’re doing all of your needle-moving work, creative work, deep work. Like for example, if you’re writing, doing a cash-on-cash on properties, or perhaps you’re going through like deep undistracted time where you’re writing, you’re strategizing, you’re writing marketing copies, et cetera, you’re thinking about your company culture, that’s when you would actually be doing, or you’re creating slideshows, or presentations, or creating talks.

05:49 If you are a third bird, your peak zone is 8 AM to 11 AM. And both of you guys, typically, the trough is going to be in the afternoon, like 1 to 5-ish or so. That’s your trough time. And for the owls, where your middle midpoint of your sleep is later than 5:30 AM, your peak zone is actually 4 PM to 9 PM. When people are winding down, going to bed, or having dinner, that’s when you can really feel like you’re bringing it on, and you can do a lot of work, right? And your trough is actually going to be the morning time. So I’ve had clients where they feel the pressure of society, and so they wake up early fighting against their owl physiology. 

So they wake up early at 5 or 6. They go into the office, and they’re kind of half asleep. They’re CEO. CEO, founder of the company feels pressured to go to work because everybody else is at work, but they’re kind of like half productive, very slow. And that actually don’t start getting more productive till 4 PM when everybody leaves until like 8 or 9 PM. So it’s a kind of like a vicious cycle where you’re cutting your own sleep. Ideally, I’ll always want to sleep until 9 or 10 PM. And after we talked, we gave permission and we allowed her to sleep two extra hours per day, and she felt great. She spent time with her parents. After waking up, did her workouts, some of like the low self-recovery, any medial tasks, or maybe just spend time with people when you don’t need cognitive energy and then went to the office in near like late morning and then was able to feel 30% more productive. Because you got more sleep during her peak zone of 4 to 8, 9 PM. So that is why it is so important to match up your energy to the tasks that you are doing. That is energy arbitrage.

07:55 So now that you know your chronotype, let’s tell all the tasks that you have to do, either isolate them to deep work. So we talked about creation, something that takes a lot of cognitive bandwidth. For example, recording this podcast, I’m actually doing it in my peak zone. Because, to me, it actually is creative work. It’s deep work for me. If I’m doing a course, a virtual course, that’s when I’m doing it, taking notes, et cetera, something that requires deep learning or creation. Sometimes for taxes, I would actually—that requires sitting down for an hour or two undistracted time—I would do that during that period. So let’s tell all the deep work items, and then let’s tell all the other items that is low cognitive energy or bandwidth that requires not much thought. For example, calling the doctor for an appointment or scheduling my windshield to be replaced mobile, which is what I did yesterday when I was very tired. So those are the little things that you can list out to do.

08:58 So now that you have your list—deep work, shallow work or low energy work, low cognitive energy work, and also all the things that you do for your recovery, right, your workouts. Maybe you have sensory deprivation flow. Maybe you have yoga. Maybe you have meditation. Maybe you have journaling. After you list those out, then what you want to do is, number one, go to your calendar of your choice. I use Google Calendar. I want you to block off on your calendar. You can do weekdays. I do weekdays. Just type in “chronotype peak zone.” And this is to make sure that whenever you’re trying to schedule something, that you are not giving up your peak energy period, that it is worth your peak energy period. If anything, it’s going to be scheduled in that peak zone. And what I’m talking about is, a lot of times, we tend to schedule meetings and calls when we have control over it. We tend to schedule meetings and calls during our peak zone, when we’re supposed to be deep into creation mode and learning mode, right? That should probably be later morning, if you’re a third bird or a lark, or afternoon. Because there’s a way that we can extend your peak zone a little bit, depending on what you’re eating and switching the position, or standing, or doing a walking desk.

10:15 Once you wake up, once you have the peak zone, every night, you will have top three priorities for the day. One or two of them is going to be deep work items. And so when you wake up, right away, theoretically, the best flow you can get is like within 90 seconds of waking. That you just go to the restroom and sit down, have your assets already open, ready to go. Because your brain is half asleep and that’s very close to your flow brainwave state, you get into flow easier at that time. But if you need to get up, get ready because of time pressure — like for me, I have done the sleep to flow for me because I never know when my kid is going to wake up. So I get ready really fast, do my cold showers, get really, really fast. And I have to pump. So I do all that like 15, max like 20 minutes, and then I get into work. You do about an hour to maybe an hour and a half if you’re flow block. Everybody can sustain typically concentration for 30 minutes, maybe to 90 minutes, maybe two hours if you’re really used to it.

11:18 Then after that, we’ll talk about the flow cycle a little bit more in detail in another episode. But you want to struggle, where it takes about 10 to 20 minutes of struggling to get into flow. Then you flow, right? Then you release, and then you recover. So the recovery would be like your yoga, you’re working out, you’re spending time with your kids, sunlight exposure, meditation, breath work. Then after all that, the recovery side, you can dive in for your second flow block during your peak zone. So if you can get two flow blocks in your peak zone, that’s essentially four to five extra productivity than if you were to try to plan to do this during your low cognitive state in your trough in the afternoon, right? That is how you can become time creators. Because you essentially get your days’ worth of stuff done by 9 AM or 11 AM.

12:18 So, again, your peak zone, if you are a lark, is 6 AM to 9 AM. If you are a third bird, it is 8 AM to 11 AM. Put this in your calendar. And then if you are an owl, it is 4 PM to 9 PM. Okay? So after this, or right now, please, please do the work of at least putting this into your calendar so that, whenever you are scheduling it, you got to really, really say, “Okay, this is worth my time. This is worth my peak zone.” As an example, I would do one flow block in the morning and then my kids wake up around 7. So from 7 to 9, that’s actually a long recovery period for me, because I do their morning routine. I spend time with them, breakfast. Sometimes I take them to school, or my husband takes them to school. It just depends. Then I go in to dive into my second flow block. Then I would do my gym and workout actually later morning, late morning afternoon in between flow blocks. So that is my release. That is my recovery. The afternoon typically are scheduled for calls, like, either with my clients or meetings, et cetera. There are ways, again, I said, to extend your flow depending on, you know. You can be standing more. You could walk. You can change your position. You can change your environment. You can change, go to a coffee shop instead. That can kind of extend your productivity and flow with a novelty, a little bit uncertainty. And ideally, you want to be standing 50% of the time. It allows you to get into flow a little bit easier, especially if you’re working with a standing desk.

14:06 Now, what you eat during your flow block is super important as well. This is why my clients get on a continuous glucose monitor so that they know when their energy dips, what food is causing their energy to dip. The general principle is that you want to eat low glycemic foods, low glycemic index foods, which is things with white carbs, pasta, rice. Anything with flour is going to spike your glucose. Surprisingly, for me, white rice, yes. But the pho noodles, the rice noodles, that spikes it up like crazy, up to like near 180 to 200. Then the broth of the Vietnamese noodle soup, it’s actually a lot of sugar. So if you could fast during your peak zone, that would be the best. And take short breaks, very short breaks, and just get right back into it. Like 5, 10 minutes, and take very short breaks. Get back to it. If you can, during your break, during this recovery, instead of going on social media or doing other stimulating things or switching to a different business or different goal—which is not exactly a break—you want to do something that stimulates less dopamine than what you’re going to do at the next flow block. The extreme example of that is staring at a wall. You can meditate. You can do breathwork, which is inhale 4 seconds, hold 7 seconds, and exhale 8 seconds. I’m not doing it, but I already feel myself slowing down.

15:35 What I do during this peak zone is actually have my bulletproof matcha. It’s hard to see here. But, yeah, this is my bulletproof matcha. For those of you guys watching on YouTube, it has fresh nutmeg, freshly-ground nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, grass-fed butter from Kerrygold, MCT brain octane oil from Bulletproof (no-financial affiliations), nut milk, typically hazelnut milk from Elmhurst—I feel like they’re the cleanest—and blend it all together in five grams of matcha, ceremonial-grade matcha. Because it is the first harvest, with the most polyphenols. So blend it all together. This is all I drink typically until late morning or noon. I actually work out fast at it as well.

16:24 All right. So to recap, find your chronotype. You’re going to put your chronotype peak zone in your calendar. You’re listing out all the tasks that you have that’s low value versus high cognitive load, right? Then you’re going to make sure you’re shuffling all those around, those calls and things like that. You’re shuffling all those around, or the appointments, or doctor’s appointments. All those things go into the trough zone, and all the important things that takes large cognitive bandwidth going to the peak zone. You may have to have discussions with your spouse, discussions with your kids perhaps, or with your business partners, with your employees or your employers. But if you can really, truly align what you do with your biology, you’ll see that you can actually four to five X your productivity.

17:20 Can you imagine if you just gain one or two hours in your life, right, in a day? That’s like five hours during the work week, right? Or maybe that’s 10 hours during the work week that you can spend however you want—to do your self-care, to spend time with your kids, to go on date nights. So super important. Do not just listen and do nothing. At the very least, figure out your chronotype. Everything I talk about is going to be in the show notes at productivitymd.com. If you haven’t seen the last episode on life vision, Wheel of Life, five goals, that is critical to do before you dive into this, so you will have the list of items that you’re doing correct. So thank you so much for your kind presence and attention. Remember that everything we need is within you now. Thank you.

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