The ideal week for Larks, Owls, and Third Birds

When it comes to weekly planning, time blocking is a powerful way to structure our time. It forces intentional prioritization, reduces the cognitive burden of deciding what to work on next, and it’s a great reality check on our overly ambitious to-do lists.

However, if we treat all time available for tasks as equal, we do ourselves (and our outputs) a massive disservice. That’s because our capacity is not stable throughout the day.

If you’ve felt the 3pm slump, you know this all too well.

Our cognitive abilities ebb and flow. We’re sharper, more creative, focused, and alert at certain times. During these peak windows, our potential is at its highest.

But for every peak, there's a trough where our energy declines.

When we understand the hidden energy patterns in our day, we can start to build our ideal schedule. This means tapping into our peak energy for deep work sessions when we tackle our hardest and cognitively demanding tasks. If instead, we spend those peaks on low-energy activities like sending emails, submitting expenses, and running errands, that energy is squandered.

Even if you don't have the luxury of setting your own schedule and you work a traditional 9-to-5, there are ways you can time your tasks to get more from the hours you work. Here’s how we recommend designing your ideal week in order to optimize your daily schedule, get more done, and achieve greater balance.

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Are you a Lark, Owl, or Third Bird?

A great starting place for identifying your optimal times for deep work, creative outputs, and recovery is to identify your chronotype. Chronotypes are our biological dispositions that determine fluctuations in energy levels and alertness. In short, they are based on our circadian rhythms.

There are a lot of factors that affect when we sleep. Our families, jobs, hobbies, and more impact our sleep patterns.

But for a moment, let’s suspend disbelief and imagine a weekend away with no responsibilities, time commitments, or alarms. When would you ideally go to bed and wake up?

Now find the midpoint. This gives us a rough sketch of your chronotype and whether you are a:

1. Morning Lark, a morning person with a midpoint up to 3:30am

2. Night Owl, a night person with a midpoint after 5:30am‍

3. Third bird, somewhere in the middle with a midpoint between 3:30-5:30am

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What does sleep have to do with deep work?

These circadian rhythms tell us more about ourselves than just when we should sleep. They also influence our biological prime time as we move through three distinct energy phases in our day:

• Peak, our highest natural energy point of the day. We can maximize our output when we use this time for focused work on analytical tasks and decision-making. Peaks generally last between 3-4 hours.
• Trough, our lowest natural energy point of the day. You feel sluggish, have trouble focusing, and are easily distracted. Your trough should be used for mundane tasks or taking a break.
• Rebound, when we experience our second highest natural energy point of the day. This is an optimal time for brainstorming, problem-solving, and creative pursuits. Inhibitions are low during this phase, helping our creativity to flow more than any other phase.

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Eighty percent of the population are Morning Larks (15%) and Third Birds (65%) who experience similar energy fluctuations during the day. Their peak hours are in the morning, they hit their trough in the afternoon, and they rebound later in the day. The difference between the two groups is the timing of these fluctuations since Morning Larks wake earlier and hit their peak around 5:00-9:00am. Third Birds usually peak between 8:00-11:00am.

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The other twenty percent of people are Owls, who experience an inverse in energy patterns, timed later in the day. They tend to have moderately high energy late morning, slump late afternoon, then peak 4:00-9:00pm or even later.

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When we can, we want to match our deep work with our peak hours. In reality, it may not always be practical. An Owl who works a 9-5, a Lark who spends the early hours getting kids ready for the day, or a Third Bird whose mornings are consumed by team meetings, can’t always devote their power hours to deep work.

We all have unmoveable constraints. But where possible, we will get the most out of ourselves if we schedule our tasks in line with our energy patterns.

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Match tasks to your energy

According to Daniel Pink, author of When, "Timing isn't everything, but it's a big thing."

According to his research, the time of day you choose to do a task accounts for 20% of the variance in performance. All else being equal, you’ll perform 20% worse on a task during your trough than you will during your peak.

What’s more, tackling something hard during a trough takes more energy. It’s like sprinting up stairs rather than taking the elevator - you can do it, but it’s harder and slower.

For Larks, this might mean getting up at 5:00am and immediately diving into deep work for an hour before anyone else in the house is up. For Owls, perhaps it’s negotiating a later start to the day so you can schedule deep work from 4:00-7:00 pm (with the bonus of fewer overlapping meetings). Third Birds may need to become protective of their time, adding morning blockers to their calendar and actively trying to schedule meetings during the afternoon.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished in even just 1-2 hours of uninterrupted deep work, when aligned with your peak hours.

Design your ideal week based on your energy

Our ideal week should have several discrete parts, including deep work, rituals, creative outputs, and recovery. When we break our days up into segments in our calendar, it helps us see where our time should be spent at each time and also provides reassurance that the schedule is manageable and realistic. When we ignore these some of these parts and instead try to tackle deep work all day, we start to burnout and performance declines.

When building your ideal week, we recommend considering four types of time blocks:

1. Deep work: Uninterrupted time devoted to high-value and challenging work. At minimum, these blocks of time are one hour and can last up to four. When possible, these should overlap with your peak productivity hours. ‍

2. Rituals: Our rituals set the right tone for our days and ease transitions from one task type to another. Whether it’s sun exposure when you wake up, an afternoon walk, a workout, or reading, these rituals are important anchors in our day. Short startup and shutdown routines can also help us transition in and out of work.‍

3. Creative or collaborative: During your rebound hours, carve out time for tasks that require more creativity, decision-making, or collaboration with others. ‍

4. Recovery: In some cases, recovery will mean doing nothing (or something that is energy giving) and can be left open. But in other cases, these trough periods can be devoted to low energy tasks, ensuring we get what we need done, without draining our energy for the next deep work session.

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It's usually easiest to schedule deep work first. In Morgen, you can do so using Frames.

A Frame is a block of time devoted to tasks that can be time blocked manually or with the AI Planner. Label it Deep Work or Power Hours to remind yourself of the importance of this time. You can add custom filters to identify the types of tasks that should be scheduled to avoid inadvertently wasting it on low-energy tasks. (You can even use tags “Peak”, “Rebound”, “Trough” is your task manager to help the AI Planner identify the right tasks for each type of Frame.

Once you’ve scheduled deep work, we recommend adding the rituals you value most using recurrent tasks. Having these in your calendar can be an important visual reminder not to deprioritize them.

Next, consider how you want to use your rebound time. For Larks and Third Birds, this falls in the afternoon, whereas for Owls, these fall in the morning. Add Frames for creative tasks or allocate this time to collaborative work sessions.

Finally, add Frames during those low-energy periods. These should be dedicated to low-energy tasks only and have recovery built in. You will want more breaks in these Frames.

Once you have your ideal week Framed in your calendar, you have the guideposts needed to plan your days.

Ideal weeks for Larks, Owls, and Third Birds

Your ideal week is highly personal and designed based on your unique rhythms, motivations, and constraints. It may need adjusting as you experiment with time blocking in this way, and even once you feel like you’ve found a good rhythm, we suggest revisiting it at least quarterly to make sure the Frames you set still serve you.

These example ideal weeks are merely starting points. The possibilities to personalize for how you work best, are endless.

1. Ideal week for Morning Larks:

2. Ideal week for a Third Bird:

3. Ideal week for a Night Owl:

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Want to learn more about using Frames to create your ideal ordinary week? Here's a great video from Kalyn Brooke about how she designs her week to best leverage her energy.

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