The Myth of Time Management

Friends,

I invite you to join my FREE upcoming webinar, EPIQ Skills: Work Smarter, Faster, Better in the Age of AI. I will help you develop three powerful skills that boost thriving, leadership, and succes in our rapidly changing world—metacongition, agency, and intrinsic motivation. It’s on Wed, June 3 at 10 am PT. Sign up here.

And on the topic of working smarter, here is a key concept that most people get wrong. They focus on time management, which is helpful, but they neglect something that is even more effective when it comes productivity—energy management. Enjoy.

Here’s a belief I held for much of my career: if I just crammed as much as possible into every waking hour, I’d eventually reach some mythical place of productivity where everything gets done and I finally feel caught up.

I was wrong. And I’ve watched thousands upon thousands of high performers be wrong in exactly the same way.

Here’s the myth: more time = more output. But here’s the reality: a tired brain working eight hours produces far less than a rested brain working five.

We spend enormous energy managing our calendars, our To Do lists, our inboxes, but you can’t actually “manage” time. It moves forward at the same pace whether you like it or not. What you can manage (and optimize) is your energy. And that changes everything.

In their research on peak performance, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz found something fascinating: human beings naturally operate in 90-minute energy cycles. Our brains move through periods of high alertness, then signal that they need to rest. Most of us override those signals with caffeine, willpower, and possibly a vague guilt that stopping means we’re not serious enough.

That override has a cost. When you push through mental fatigue without recovery, you don’t just slow down. You make worse decisions, produce lower-quality work, and burn through the emotional reserves you need to create, lead, and connect.

Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan said it well: resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure. We’ve had the whole thing backwards. We’ve been celebrating people who push through, when we should be studying how elite performers rest.

Think about Olympic athletes. They don’t train 16 hours a day and call it dedication. They train in structured bursts, recover deliberately, and protect their sleep like it’s a stockpile of gold. What if we applied that same logic to our work?

Here’s a practical framework to try this week.

Structure your day around three intensive 90-minute work blocks (you might get four, depending on circumstances). During those windows, do your most important, cognitively demanding work, the kind that requires real focus and original thinking. Then stop. Actually stop.

Recovery isn’t scrolling LinkedIn at your desk. Recovery means stepping away for 10 to 15 minutes: a walk outside, a conversation with someone who energizes you, a meditation, or simply doing nothing for a few minutes and letting your brain decompress. Daniel Pink recommes a short walk outside each afternoon, not just for the break, but because the insights you’ve been chasing often show up the moment you stop chasing them. (The brain doesn’t stop working when you step away. It keeps processing in the background. The “shower epiphany” is a real thing.)

One of the easiest wins here: eat lunch away from your desk. I know it sounds obvious, but few people in the U.S. do it consistently. It’s quite sad.

Not all hours are created equal. Research on circadian rhythms shows that mornings tend to favor analytical, focused, detail-oriented work for most people. That’s when your brain is sharpest and your inhibitions are highest, which is exactly what careful, precise thinking requires.

The afternoon is a different animal. The post-lunch slump is real, and trying to do deep focus work in that time slot is a losing battle. But here’s the reframe: don’t fight it, use it. Daniel Pink’s research suggests the slight cognitive looseness of the slump can actually support brainstorming, lighter collaboration, and tasks that don’t demand maximum precision.

So schedule your focused deep work in the morning. Use the afternoon for collaboration, creative exploration, admin, or genuine rest.

Here’s a disturbing (though unsurprising) stat: the average person gets interrupted 87 times a day. U.S. employees toggle between 13+ different apps and switch contexts 30 times daily. And every interruption doesn’t just cost you the moment, it costs you the recovery time needed to return to focused flow, which is generally over 20 minutes!

That means a single interruption during a deep work block can effectively end it.

During your three work bursts, close what you don’t need. Silence notifications. Set your status as away Guard those windows like the scarce, valuable resource they are.

Here’s a psychological reality that most people ignore: every decision you make costs cognitive energy. By the end of a full day of meetings and choices, your brain is running on fumes, and the quality of your decisions tanks accordingly. This is decision fatigue, and it’s real.

Barack Obama only wore two suit colors (grey and navy blue), and Steve Jobs always wore a turtleneck. This wasn’t a fashion statement. It was a deliberate strategy to eliminate one decision and protect mental energy for what actually mattered.

You don’t have to wear a uniform. But you can create routines that reduce low-stakes decisions: a weekly meal plan, a standard morning sequence, preset agendas for recurring meetings, clear delegation guidelines. The goal is to subtract decisions that don’t require you so the ones that do get your best thinking.

The myth in ambitious corporate culture (and maybe in your own mind) is that working “tirelessly” for long hours is a mark of high performance. That powering through is a virtue. That the willingness to grind it out is what separates the good from the great.

I’ve worked with enough high performers to know that’s not true. The people doing the best work aren’t the ones working the longest hours (though sometimes long hours are required). They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to consistently show up at their best, and that requires recovery as a non-negotiable part of the plan—not a reward for finishing everything first.

Success is not how many hours of work you can jam into a day. It’s how effective you are when you’re actually working.

Try this: for the next two weeks, protect three 90-minute focus blocks each day. Take a real break between them. Eat lunch away from your desk. Use your afternoon slump for creative work. And find two decisions in your week that you can eliminate, automate, or delegate.

See what happens.

Be EPIQ,

Rich

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