Here’s the simple truth.

To maintain or improve productivity in fewer hours, you need to redesign how work is done. No longer can you remain in the inefficiencies of traditional work structures—that keep you stuck in unproductive routines—like unnecessary meetings and misaligned tasks that drain your energy. Instead, you need to redesign your workflows by leveraging time tracking and energy mapping, to streamline your processes and align tasks with your natural energy patterns.

Typically, we organise our working day with the assumption that our energy and attention levels don’t vary throughout the day, and that every hour is interchangeable.

It’s an approach to work (and time) that comes from the factory, where workers would do the same job for an entire shift. But research shows that our ability to focus and work on cognitive tasks varies throughout the day, depending on our energy levels, alertness, and attention. Not only that, most people can only sustain intensive focus for about 90 to 120 minutes before attention falters.

That’s exactly why it’s so important to divide your days into blocks of different levels of focus and quiet.

When you start to look at your workflow in this way, it helps you to see time as something that you can design and the workday as something you can play around with. The idea of time as designable isn’t one of those abstract concepts that few of us can grasp. It’s something you can learn.

So how do you learn it? By doing these things:

How To Redesign Your Workday In 4 Steps

Step 1: Track Your Time

Before I started tracking my time I thought I was being efficient. In reality I was barely working.

This was mostly due to untracked time spent on distractions, multitasking, and inefficiencies like context switching. By tracking your time and identifying wasted efforts, you can regain focus, prioritise deep work, and eliminate low-value tasks. This is the first step to approaching your workday with more intention.

Start by following my 4-step guide on time tracking here.

Step 2: Eliminate Low-Value Tasks

With your time tracked and categorised, you should have a pretty good idea of where it’s been going.

The next step is to free up some time. Start by taking a look at your categorised tasks (e.g., high-value tasks, low-value tasks, interruptions, distractions, etc.). Next eliminate everything you can. A great place to start is with distractions, and meetings. The average office worker spends forty to sixty percent of their time in email and meetings. Can you batch your emails rather than check sporadically throughout the day? Can you keep your meetings after lunch in your low-energy zones to keep your morning clear for focussed high-value work?

These are the questions you need to ask yourself in order to eliminate inefficiencies.

Step 3: Map Your Energy

Many of us believe the misconception that longer hours lead to higher productivity.

But it’s simply not true. Our energy levels fluctuate throughout the day and therefore should guide how we work. By aligning high-value tasks with peak energy periods, you can work more efficiently, improve the quality of your output, and avoid burnout.

Start with my 3-step guide to create your personalised energy map. Then, with your energy mapped, divide your day into segments based on your energy levels: Low, medium, and high.

Step 4: Align Tasks To Your Energy Levels

Once you’ve eliminated low-value tasks, converted them into free time, and mapped your energy, it’s time to defragment your day.

This is where we consolidate work into our energy segments (low, medium, and high) to create large blocks of time where you can focus on tasks without distraction. For example, I’m a morning person and that’s when my energy’s at its peak. So I leave my phone in another room, shutdown email, and spend the first 4 hours everyday on my highest-value tasks (without interruption). I can then spend my low-energy period on routine tasks like checking email, attending to calls, meetings, etc.

Defragmenting your day like this allows you to make the most of your energy by matching the right task to the right energy level. By creating focused blocks of time during your high-energy periods, you can dive into deep work, solve complex problems, or move forward on your most important projects. This approach reduces the start-and-stop rhythm that comes from context switching and multitasking, which kills productivity.

Ultimately, this is THE SECRET to working less, and achieving more.

In Conclusion

Redesigning your workday doesn’t have to be complicated.

It’s about making small, intentional changes that help you work less, not more. By tracking your time, eliminating low-value tasks, and aligning your energy levels with the right activities, you can streamline your workflow and actually get more done in less time.

The key takeaway?

You don’t need to work more hours to be productive. Focus on working better during the hours you do have. Start small, test things out, and tweak as you go—before you know it, you’ll be hitting your goals with less stress and more free time.

Next week we’re going to take this to the next level, by prioritising an environment that supports deep work and focus.

See you then!

Josh