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Flipping the 9-5: Energy matters

6 - Flipping the 9 to 5-01

I’ve found this to be a hard experiment so far.  The idea is that I would spend my daytime relaxing and the hit it hard for four hours – 5pm until 9pm – proving that a good dose of ninja ruthlessness can mean optimum productivity in half a normal working day.

It hasn’t quite worked out like that.  I’ve put in some good 5-9 shifts, but also had 2 or 3 complete write-off ones, including today’s.  The reason for today’s was that I spent about four hours doing some much-needed but tedious and stressful household chores (including mortgage applications, online shopping and admin) which meant that by 5pm, I already felt pretty tired and unable to really focus.  It’s actually quite difficult to get up at a non-slobby time in the morning and keep your energy held back so that you’re not at all tired at 5pm.

There also seems to have been a lot of exceptions to the rule of only working 5-9pm.  Last week was our away day, which had been scheduled before the experiment started, so I made a conscious decision to just have an exception day, but there have also been a few phonecalls and the like that have needed to happen during the day (the idea being that a 30 minute call would then mean I’d do a 3.5 hour shift later) and hence I’ve found myself in a ‘work energy’ kind of zone at say, 2pm, making it hard to then switch off to start properly at 5pm.

So perhaps for this to work, it needs to be a four hour period that utilises the optimum energy.  I’m not a morning person, but I’m going to give this a crack next week.  5am til 9am.  What if you could finish your workday at 9am and have the whole day to yourself?  Could that be a productive and sustainable way to work?

I’ll let you know next week…

6 - Flipping the 9 - 5-03

 

 

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