Focus your energy. Master your time.
Get It Done
1-2-3: The Scheduling Secret That Makes Your Hardest Tasks Feel Easier
sent by Joaquín Kosegarten | June 23, 2026
You are not imagining it. Some hours of the day you are sharp, creative, and unstoppable.
Others, you can barely string a sentence together.
The difference is not your mood. It’s your biology.
And once you start scheduling around it, everything changes.
1 Idea
Schedule your hardest tasks during your daily energy peak, not whenever they fit.
2 Ways it saves you time
1. Your brain has a built-in performance rhythm called your chronotype. At peak, it thinks faster, makes fewer errors, and reaches conclusions more efficiently. That same task taking 90 minutes in a low-energy slot? It takes 45 minutes at peak. Same work, half the time.
2.Most people schedule deep work around whatever time is left after meetings and emails. That leftover time is almost always a low-energy slot, meaning your most important work gets your worst brain. Flip this one habit and you stop losing hours to slow, draining effort.
3 Steps to Get It Done:
1.For the next three days, notice when you feel naturally sharp and focused. Morning, late morning, early afternoon? Write it down. That’s your peak window.
2. Block that window in your calendar before anything else claims it. Label it “Deep Work” and treat it like your most important meeting of the day.
3.Put your single hardest task there every day this week. No email, no calls, no exceptions during that block.
Conclusion
You don’t need more hours. You need to take advantage of the better ones.
Matching your hardest work to your sharpest mind is one of those shifts that feels almost unfair once you make it. Start today and by Friday you will wonder why you ever worked any other way. This is what the Brain step in Get It Done is built around: working with your natural rhythms instead of constantly fighting against them.
“But…my schedule is not mine to control, meetings decide my day!”
That’s true for some hours. Not all of them. Even with a packed calendar, most people have at least one window they could protect if they decided it was non-negotiable. The question is not whether you have time. It’s whether you are willing to defend it.
As promised — 1 minute that can save you hours
Yours in Getting It Done,
Joaquin Kosegarten
Author of Get It Done
Creator of the 1-2-3 Get It Done Newsletter
P.S. Fun Fact: Chronobiology, the science of how time affects biological function, has found that the difference in cognitive performance between a person’s peak and off-peak hours can be equivalent to the effect of being legally drunk. A study published in Psychological Science found that tasks requiring analytical thinking were completed significantly faster and more accurately during peak hours, while the same individuals performed at notably lower levels just a few hours later. You are not a different person at 4pm. You are just a person whose brain has already given its best for the day.
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The Scheduling Secret That Makes Your Hardest Tasks Feel Easier
About the Newsletter
1-2-3 Get It Done is a weekly 1-minute read trusted by busy professionals who want to achieve more in less time without burning out.
Each issue gives you 1 idea, 2 ways it saves you time, and 3 steps to put it into action immediately.