by Serguey Shinder
I had a system, and on paper it was a good one. The important, demanding work, the thinking that actually moved things forward, went at the end of the day. The reasoning felt airtight. Mornings were full of meetings and messages and small urgent things, so I would clear all of that first, get it out of the way, and then, with a clean desk and no interruptions, do the real work in the calm of the late afternoon. I protected that evening block fiercely.
The problem was that by the time the evening block arrived, there was nothing left to protect it with. I had spent the whole day's supply of focus on email, on decisions, on the small draining friction of a hundred minor things, and I arrived at my sacred deep-work hour with an empty tank. I would sit down to do the important thinking and find that the person who was supposed to do it had already been spent, hours earlier, on things that did not deserve him.
I had made a basic error, which was to treat time and energy as the same resource. My schedule protected the time. It said nothing about the energy, and energy, unlike time, is not evenly distributed across the day. I have a few hours of genuine cognitive sharpness, and I had been spending every one of them on the tasks that needed it least, saving the depleted hours for the tasks that needed it most. I had it exactly backwards.
The reason I had it backwards is that the easy work is a wonderful way to feel productive while avoiding the hard work. Clearing the inbox gives a steady drip of small completions. The important thinking gives nothing for a long time, only difficulty. So of course I front-loaded the rewarding-feeling shallow work and pushed the difficult deep work to the end, and dressed the avoidance up as a system. The order was not a strategy. It was procrastination with a calendar.
Fixing it was almost insultingly simple and genuinely hard to do. I moved the deep work to the front, to the sharpest hours, before the meetings, before the inbox, before the day had a chance to spend me. And I let the shallow work happen in the afternoon, in the depleted hours, where its low demands actually fit the low energy I had left. The email still gets answered. It just gets answered by the tired version of me, which is all it ever needed.
It felt wrong for weeks, starting the day with the hard thing while the easy things piled up unattended and visible. But the piled-up easy things were never the ones that mattered, and doing them first had only ever bought me the feeling of progress at the cost of the real thing. I stopped guarding the time and started guarding the energy, and the important work finally got the version of me that could actually do it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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