Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jess Eddy Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Time off of work can be very illuminating and helpful in uncovering patterns that can improve your natural work schedule. Have you noticed how you naturally fall into patterns that work well for you when you don’t have to be in an office everyday at 9am? When you don’t have to adhere to a strict schedule? By patterns I mean, what you choose to do and when and how these choices start to design your day, everyday.

I’ve noticed that while on holiday, I still get up early but in the morning, I replace going to work with reading and or writing or some other creative opportunity — given all the time in the world, this becomes my natural pattern. They become patterns because they work for me and help me achieve my goals in a natural format. They help me reach peak performance.

Peak performance requires an uninterrupted block of time, in an environment where I can focus, at a time during they day when I’m most creative.

Peak Performance and 80/20 Rule

A nice companion concept to keep in mind when it comes to quality output is the 80/20 rule or “Pareto Principle.” this rule suggests that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results. If we can consistently reach our 20%, it will help us reach peak performance.

I look at these concepts through the lens of being a designer, a maker. I believe the biggest problem in today’s workplace is, as makers and because we do not control our environment, our environment controls us: we do not get to focus enough on the 20%. It’s extremely difficult to reach peak performance

Possibly the most important aspect to peak performance is when it happens.

The First 90 Minutes Rule

From Thomas Oppong

“The basic principle of the first 90 minutes rule is to start your day by spending the first 90 minutes on your most important task.”

“You are most productive in the morning. You’re fresh and focused in the morning, even if you don’t feel it. Your best work happens within a short time span of the day. And you should be making the most of it. Your productive morning should be spent on outputs, not inputs.”

According to this, a good portion of my first 90 minutes is commuting to work. The rest is spent greeting co-workers, catching up with people and reading and responding to Slack messages and email. I can fit in a trip to the gym in the morning but I only go in the morning because this time works best for me, inside of a traditional workday. Since I go to the gym in the morning, it becomes my most important task. This often times drains me of creative energy; my number one asset.

By the time I actually sit down to work, the window of time where I’m most creative is over and it’s an uphill battle for the rest of the day.

Being mindful of people’s time and etiquette around scheduling meetings is a must, but these issues still exist because we’re trying to solve them in the construct of a traditional 9–5 schedule. This is where things break and they break quickly.

Designing a Day for Outputs

Companies need to come to grips with the fact that not all employees are well suited for a traditional work schedule. To get the most out of your employees, we need to understand that different people need different things. We need to understand how designers, engineers, product/project managers, etc. can reach peak performance.

I believe companies need to radically depart from tradition, from what makes them “comfortable” and focus on what works.

Figuring out how a group can work together, physically in the same room when they need to is important, but secondary to understanding the individual needs of people and how each person can reach peak performance. Peak performance is where true productivity, “magic” happens.

My Perfect Day

I’ve worked full-time in an office for the past year and a half. This was preceded by almost six years of working for myself. These two stark contrasts have really illuminated what works for me and what doesn’t, in terms of scheduling, productivity and creativity.

There are other things that are important to me, that are unrelated to work but indirectly make me better at my job: meditation and exercise. So when I think of designing my day around optimizing for outputs and peak performance, I take these things into consideration.

This is my perfect day.

6a: Get up, drink the coffee
6:15a: Meditate
6:45a: Start Working (at home)
10:15a: Leave for gym
11–12:45: gym then lunch
1p: Arrive at work
5p: Leave work

That’s a solid 7.5 workday, optimized for peak performance. I’ve put all of my best, creative energy into work — for 3.5 hours. I believe many of you share in the idea that 3 or so hours of uninterrupted work at your peak performance time is better than eight hours spent in an office, where you have less control over your schedule. Research suggests that many people work about three hours in an eight hour workday anyway.

Ron Friedman, Ph.D., and author of The Best Place to Work, on how to structure your day to get the most done says that the first three hours of your day are your most precious for maximized productivity.

“Typically, we have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused. We’re able to have some strong contributions in terms of planning, in terms of thinking, in terms of speaking well,” — Ron Friedman

But we’re a startup…

If you’re thinking that this won’t work in your startup, why? Of any type of company, employee performance and productivity is most important in a startup. Time is not on your side when you’re a startup. If you feel like your team has to be together for eight hours out of the day, you’re either having too many (likely unproductive) meetings or having people in the office makes you feel like you have a sense of control. From the schedule above, your team still has a full four hours to spend together doing whatever! Four hours is starting to sound like a lot, maybe it’s too much. 🙂

What now?

Pay attention to your own habits and find your peak performance time. Think about — if you could structure your perfect day what would it look like. Test it out and remember that you don’t get what you don’t ask for.

Would love to hear your thoughts — leave a comment and or talk to me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jesseddy

Designers: how can we design a day around peak performance? was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designers: how can we design a day around peak performance?

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