Do you feel like you’re running out of time but still can’t get enough done? It might not be your time management—it’s your energy! In this episode, I’ll teach you how to align your productivity with your body’s natural rhythms, identify your peak energy hours, and unlock your true creative potential. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube
Chapter 1: What is the single productivity system you need?
Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, we're gonna be talking about how to be more productive and I'm gonna give you one productivity system that you really, really need. And it might be a productivity system that you've never heard of and maybe never even thought of.
But let's be real, most productivity advice tells you to manage your time better, to set up a calendar, to batch your tasks, to wake up at 5 a.m. and grind and grind and grind. And don't get me wrong, I do think that time management is super, super important in so many people. think that they have no time, but in reality, they're just terrible at managing their time.
Chapter 2: Why is time management not enough for productivity?
But if time management alone were the answer, wouldn't everybody just be productivity machines by now? Yeah, but the real problem is not that you need more time. The real problem is that you probably need more energy. And not only do you need more energy, you need to get better at planning out your energy.
And you need to plan out your energy with the natural cycles of your body throughout the day, which just FYI is different for every single person.
Do you ever notice like if you have a day where for some reason you wake up, you feel really well rested, you have your cup of coffee, you feel like you have a lot of energy, you wanna run through a wall, and you're like, you know what, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna be productive. And in two hours, you crank out more than you have in an entire day with low energy.
Have you ever noticed that happening before? It's not that you got better at time management for one day and then you were terrible at time management a couple days later. It's that your energy dictated how productive you were in the time that you were actually working. And that's because of energy, not because of time. And energy is the real currency of productivity.
And when I really realized this about probably 10 years ago, I started really paying attention to my energy when it was up, my energy was down. I started paying attention to my sleep when it was up, when it was down, what I did, what I didn't do, what could have gotten in the way. If I had a lot of energy one day, I started paying attention to what I ate or didn't eat. earlier throughout the day.
And if I had a big dip in energy, I was like, what just happened? Okay, I just ate this thing. Okay, that reminds me I never want to eat whatever that thing was again in the middle of the day. If it's something that I like, I can have it in the afternoon. When I'm done working, I can have it in the evening for dinner, but definitely not in the middle of the day.
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Chapter 3: How does energy management enhance productivity?
And so that's one thing that you really want to think about is what does your energy look like throughout the day? And I want to chat with you real quick about traditional time management and how it fails you and how energy management can transform the way that you work, the way that you create, and the way that you live as well. So let me tell you why time management isn't enough.
Time management assumes that you have the same level of focus at all hours throughout the entire day. And you just don't. You have different levels of energy at different times of the day and on different days. And if you just schedule things, just put it in your schedule,
and you don't look at how your energy actually flows throughout the day, you might put a very important task at the point where you have the least amount of energy throughout the day. You might schedule a really important client call at a time where you just don't have a whole lot of energy.
So in reality, some hours of the day, you're sharp, you're productive, you're firing on all cylinders, you're more creative, your brain's going well. And then other hours of the day, you're sluggish. And your energy can fluctuate on a lot of different things, on the sleep that you have, on the food, on your emotions, on your environment.
And so there was a study that actually Harvard Business Review did, and it was in 2007, it was by Tony Schwartz and by Catherine McCarthy. And they found out that employees who manage their energy rather than their time, were significantly more productive and engaged than those who didn't manage their energy.
And participants at Wachovia Bank who followed their energy management techniques improved their revenue by 13% compared to the other group, which was only 6% in the control group. And so these are people who not only looked at their time, but they said, well, let me figure out what my energy is like. Let me figure out what I feel like at this time of the day versus another time of the day.
And so it's not about just squeezing more into your day and trying to get your to-do list completely done or just following hustle culture and working all hours of the day. It's about working better during the hours when you and your body and your brain have peak energy. And so, you know, instead of asking yourself something like, how can I fit more into my day?
What you really want to do is you want to take a step back and think to yourself, how can I optimize my energy so that I work better? I'm more productive and I don't have to work longer hours, which is completely opposite than what a lot of people think and what I used to think years ago. For me, I was like, I'm just going to work 12 hours a day and then I'm going to get more done.
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Chapter 4: What are ultradian rhythms and how do they affect productivity?
Now that I'm older, I get way more done, but because I schedule out my day based off of how my energy flows, I'm way more productive than when I used to work 12 hours a day, 15 hours a day when I was younger. And when you think about your energy and you think about the flow of who you are and how you operate, it shifts everything for you.
So instead of treating your day like an endless to-do list, you designed it around these natural flows and rhythms. And so your energy is going to peak throughout the day. It's going to dip throughout the day. So what you have to understand is your body runs on things that are called ultradian rhythms.
And this is a natural biological cycle that occurs multiple times throughout the day and they typically last about 90 minutes. And so your body's gonna flow through natural rhythms about every 90 minutes. And so there's three different types of people that usually exist in the world. And you need to kind of start paying attention to your energy more to figure out which one you are.
So there are morning people, which are people who have peak energy early, and then it declines in the afternoon. There's people that are like the midday thrivers. This is me, where I don't really have a whole lot of energy, and I'm not the most excited. person in the morning. I'm fine. I'm chill in the morning, but I'm not wanting to get a whole bunch of shit done in the morning.
But I like hit my stride a little bit before lunch. And then I start to slow down in the evening. And then there's people that are just night owls who might struggle a little bit in the morning, but then they peak in the evening. My best friend is He gets a little bit of a bump that's like, you know, a little bit of excitement, a little bit of energy around like one o'clock.
But there's times when he will text me. I'll wake up in the morning and I'll have a text from him at like one o'clock in the morning because at like 10 or 11 o'clock at night after his kids go to bed, he gets this crazy spike in energy. I'm like, I'm asleep by that time. I'm asleep by 10, 1030. And so who are you and what's really your energy is what you need to figure out.
And then you plan your productivity based off of that. And so there was a study that was done by Christopher Barnes at the University of Washington in 2011. And they actually found out that cognitive performance varies based on an individual's chronotype, which is whether they're an evening person, a midday person, or a morning person. And we will be right back. And now back to the show.
And so morning people tend to perform best before noon. Night people were the best and their sharpest in the evening, usually after seven, eight o'clock at night. And so your energy isn't this constant thing. What you want to do is start to be aware of your own natural rhythm and work with it versus working against it. So you need to figure out which one of those that you are.
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Chapter 5: How can you identify your personal energy cycles?
Now, how do you figure out which one you are if you don't know at this moment? Here's what I recommend. If you have a phone, you can set an hour-long timer so it goes off every 60 minutes. And so when you wake up in the morning, you're going to wake up and you're going to set a 60-minute timer a couple minutes after waking up. Then what happens is 60 minutes later, your timer is going to go off.
And what I want you to do is I want you to have a notes tab in your phone. So say you wake up at 7 o'clock, right? You wake up at 7 a.m., your alarm goes off at 8, okay? So you're going to go to your notes tab and you're going to have an energy tracker inside of your phone.
And you're going to say from seven to eight, and you're going to rate yourself on a scale of one to 10, your energy and your focus over the past hour. So then your alarm, you're going to reset it from eight to nine. So it's going to go off at nine. You're going to rate on a scale of one to 10, what your energy was for the past hour. And you're going to do this every day for a week.
And what you'll start to notice is that your body has natural cycles that it goes through. And so you can start to plan your day. I'll tell you how I plan my day in just a minute and what my day looks like based off of how I know my energy is. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna align different tasks with your energy levels.
So now that you know, because you made the whole list and you did this for a week, now that you know your peaks and your dips, you're gonna match your tasks accordingly. So when you need to get really deep work done, which is like creative projects, problem solving, strategy, that's when you want to do it when your energy period is at its highest. So when is your energy at its highest?
That's when you're going to do the deep work, the problem solving, the creative stuff, the strategy. The medium energy periods is kind of like your routine work, which is emails, which is admin, which is meetings on Zoom, all of that. And then your low energy period is like rest and recovery.
It could be movement, it could be fun, it could be rest, hanging out with the family, whatever it might be. And so, you know, you have to understand that the less amount of energy that you have, the less you're creating, you know, really good decisions. The more amount of energy you have, the better decisions you're making.
There's actually a really interesting study that was done in 2011, and they actually looked at parole judges, and they found out that the judgments were significantly harsher right before their breaks and more lenient after their breaks. And the reason why is because they're working so much and they start to get decision fatigue.
And so their energy declined the more decisions that they were making. And then they ended up having way harsher judgments when their energy was down. And so their cognitive function went down as well. Then they took a break.
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