How to Identify Your Chronotype and Optimize Daily Productivity

[00:00:00]Everyone has an individual hardcoded peak performance window, a set of hours within every day where your productivity and performance blow through the roof.

[00:00:08]And if you can discover this and work within it, your performance will skyrocket. Now, I'm Ri Darus, co-founder and CEO of the Flow Research Collective.

[00:00:15]And along with my partner, Steven Cutotler, we've taught thousands of professionals how to access flow state at will. Now, tell me if this sounds like you. Your first caffeinated hour or two of work is sharp. You feel clear.

[00:00:28]You feel creative. You can think without constraint, but as the hours go by, your brain starts to lag. Fatigue sets in and you notice your mind isn't thinking as clearly, and you're more susceptible to distractions. Checking your phone feels increasingly irresistible. Hour by hour, your day devolves to the point that you're a fraction as productive as you were when you first started work. Now, it's easy to chalk this up to a lack of discipline or failing work ethic. But in reality, what you're struggling with here is not a character flaw. It's a biological timing issue because our cognitive abilities don't stay static throughout the day. We are smarter, quicker, dimmer, slower, and more or less creative at different times, which means that certain tasks are best performed at certain times. Now, what's driving these shifts in performance?

[00:01:16]Well, herein enters chronobiology. So, imagine for a moment being lowered into a cave and submerged in darkness. In the silence, your only companion is the steady drip of water forming a stellagmite nearby. Now, imagine living like this for 7 months. Well, in the 1960s, someone actually did. Observed by NASA scientists, French geologist Michael Cifra lived underground for 205 days. Similar experiments were run by the Max Plank Institute for Behavioral Psychology. And these experiments led to a startling finding. With or without light or a sense of time, our bodies keep a consistent rhythm. Building on this discovery, Dr. Till Runberg of Ludwig Maximleian University embarked on a huge research project. For over 10 years, he tracked the sleep patterns of 50,000 people, when they went to bed, when they woke up, and how long they slept. In analyzing this mountain of data, Ronberg discovered that just as each person has a unique fingerprint, every individual has a unique chronotype. Now, a chronoype is a biologically ingrained predisposition that determines the fluctuations in your alertness, your energy, and accordingly your productivity within a given 24-hour period. These chronotypes are determined by circadian rhythms, the internal clocks regulating our sleep wake cycles which are shaped by a blend of genetics, lifestyle habits, and environmental cues. And your chronotype is the outward behavioral manifestation of your internal circadian rhythm. Three distinct chronotypes emerged from Ronberg's research, ranging from morningness, eveningness, and something in between. and his findings here have strongly challenged the conventional one-sizefits-all approach to work schedules and to productivity. But this was only half of what Ronberg discovered by testing the cognitive skills, memory, reaction times, and attention spans at all hours across a 24-hour span. Ronberg pinpointed the exact windows where test subjects were prone to perform well or hit a wall of fatigue and perform poorly. He had unwittingly discovered that within your chronoype lies your chronotype zone, a daily peak performance window that's coded into your biology. Your chronotype zone is the time within your physiologies 24-hour cycle where cognitive functions like memory recall, attention span, and reaction times are at their highest.

[00:03:46]which makes our flow proness that is our likelihood of accessing flow state that state of optimal consciousness where we feel and function our best highest. And this is a huge advantage because flow does not work like a light switch either on or off. It's part of a four stage cycle that goes from struggle to release to flow and then recovery on the back end after the flow state. And this heightened energy and cognition that arises within our chronotype zone enables us to shortcut the struggle phase, plunging ourselves into flow faster and then sustaining the flow state for longer. The trouble is most of us work outside of this window of peak cognition that we get for free from our biology within this chronotype zone and we don't even realize it. Most organisms follow their innate chronotypes without resistance. When tired, the dog sleeps.

[00:04:35]When fed, the lion rests. When night falls, the owl hunts. However, humans possess big preffrontal cortices and high levels of self-consciousness as a result. This comes with many blessings.

[00:04:48]We can speak. We can think. We can use symbolic reasoning, but also the curse of being able to defy our chronotype. We can willfully delay sleep even when our body screams for rest or force ourselves to work even when our brain can barely function. And fighting against our biology like this flies in the face of peak performance. Instead, by building on centuries of chronobiology research, we can arrange our days around our biological peaks and troughs to consistently access flow states and peak performance. And it starts with identifying your chronotype. In synthesizing the research of Dr. Till Ronberg and others, author Dan Pink codified three chronotypes. Larks, these are morning people, owls, night people, and third birds, most people. If you're a lark, you're naturally inclined to wake up early, around 6:00 a.m. If you're an owl, you tend to stay up late and wake at around 10:00 a.m. If you're not an extreme morning person or a night owl, you're most likely what Dan Pink calls a third bird. You tend to wake up at around 8:00 a.m. This is most common as a chronotype. Now, remember, your chronotype and sleep preferences aren't something you choose. They're largely dictated by your genetics. So contrary to what you've probably heard, owls, your late nights don't mean you're lazy.

[00:06:05]Third birds, you're not a slow starter.

[00:06:07]Keep this in mind. Whenever you are made to feel guilty or pressured by others or your workplace or society to wake or sleep or function in certain ways at certain times, what matters is that you stick to your schedule based on your chronoype. So, here's how to find your chronotype and your chronoype zone in 5 minutes or less. Now, for a second, I want you to imagine you're on a month-long holiday on some beautiful island in Thailand where there are zero obligations, no caffeine, no work arrangements, or recall a time when you've experienced something like this, maybe on a sbatical. The key is that during this time, you're fully attuned to your natural rhythm, sleeping and waking exactly when your body feels like it. Now, with this visual in mind, just answer the following question. When you control your schedule and you don't have obligations, what time do you naturally end up going to bed? And what time do you naturally end up waking up? Then determine the midpoint between these two times. For example, if you go to sleep at 1:00 a.m. and you get up at 9:00 a.m.

[00:07:07]with 8 hours of sleep, the midpoint is 500 a.m. Once you identify your midpoint, you'll have a rough sketch of your chronotype. And you can see on screen here where your chrono type lands you based on your midpoint. If your midpoint is 3:30 a.m. or earlier, you're likely a lark. Approximately 10% of people fall into this category. If your midpoint is 5:30 a.m. or later, you're likely an owl. Around 25% of people. If your midpoint is somewhere in between, you're likely a third bird. About 50 to 55% of people. Now once you know your chronotype lark, owl or third bird, you can then determine your chronotype zone which is when your energy levels and cognitive abilities are at their peak.

[00:07:47]For larks, the chronotype zone is typically in the early morning around 5 or even 4:00 a.m. until about 8 or 9:00 a.m. For owls, the chronotype zone is usually in the late afternoon or evening around 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. And for thirds, it tends to be 8 to 11:00 a.m.

[00:08:04]roughly. Now, here's why this is so important. First, trying to tackle certain tasks at the wrong time of day for your chronoype is like sprinting upstairs instead of taking the elevator.

[00:08:16]You can still get where you want to go, but compared to the elevator, progress is painfully and unnecessarily slow. And this period of the day, outside your chronotype zone, it's got a name. It's called the trough. It's the point at which your cognitive resources are at their lowest. And here's the tragedy.

[00:08:32]Most leaders, most knowledge workers, likely yourself included here, spend most of your effort in the trough, which is a huge waste. Working during the trough feels like slogging through mud.

[00:08:44]Tasks are hard, effort required is high, and output ends up being mediocre. It's not just inefficient, it's often counterproductive. Mistakes creep in.

[00:08:54]Your future self has to clean up the mess. a mess that wouldn't have happened had you worked within your chronoype zone and harnessed the peak cognition your body gives you for free in that period. Now, in contrast, when you allocate focus during your chronoype zone, you get the opposite feeling. It's like gliding on air. Tasks are easy, perceived exertion is low, output skyrockets, work is efficient and rewarding, everything goes smoothly, and your future self thanks you. A result of working within your chronotype zone.

[00:09:21]This is because your body naturally produces alpha and theta brain waves which are commonly associated with flow states. During the same time frame, two key neurotransmitters peak. Cortisol boosting energy and serotonin helping you simultaneously relax. So by aligning your tasks with these brain waves and neurochemical peaks, you're more likely to get into flow. Now, here's a helpful analogy to illustrate this. Imagine your chronotype zone as that perfect time at the beach when the waves are just beautiful for surfing. paddling out, you find yourself riding one incredible, irresistible wave after another, merging with the rhythm of the ocean. Then inevitably, the waves go flat. You find yourself paddling aimlessly against the wind, your arms burning, looking for that elusive wave to ride. That's the trough. That period where no matter what you do, productivity is elusive, just out of grasp. you might as well get out of the water in this case and shift your focus elsewhere until the waves your energy returns. So now that you know your chronotype zone, the second key is determining which activities should be scheduled during the trough and which activities you should place and focus on within your chronotype zone. I figured this out a number of years ago when I accidentally discovered that the hours of the 24-hour day can be wildly unequal. I was living in Spain in Barcelona with a bunch of entrepreneurs in this crazy apartment in P the Gracia.

[00:10:44]If you've been to Barcelona, you might know that street. Days began late around 10:00 a.m. filled with work spurts and frequent siestas. Random meetups would punctuate the day, followed by a stretch of work, sometimes until 10 or 11 p.m.

[00:10:57]Food breaks often led to quick naps only to be jolted awake sometimes in the middle of the night around 1:00 a.m. for another round of work or for a really late Spanish dinner. And at times, the allure of Barcelona's nightlife would pull us into a club at 4:00 a.m. only to crawl back to the apartment by dawn and crash till late afternoon. Now, despite the fun of living the Barcelona lifestyle, I could feel that something was off. My productivity and my cognition wasn't matching up to my potential, what I knew it could be. I wasn't progressing, creating, or thinking at nearly the level that I knew was possible. And then I moved to LA.

[00:11:32]Thanks to the jet lag in moving over from Europe, I started naturally waking up at 4:00 a.m. And I found that this time zone difference unexpectedly gave me productivity superpowers. On a whim one morning, I jumped into work right after getting up instead of wasting time at about 4:10 a.m. And I was shocked to get more done by 10:00 a.m. than what I used to get done in an entire day in Barcelona. And I realized that these early morning hours were my peak productivity times, my biological chronotype zone. I could concentrate intensely and annihilate tasks within those few hours. And this explains why I felt something was so far off when I was living in Barcelona. It was because a large chunk of my work hours. Nearly 90% sat outside my chronotype zone in the trough. And I'd learned a hard lesson here. when you work is even more important in many cases than how much you work, who you're working with, or even how hard you work. And this is counterintuitive because we tend to overindex on the variables of effort and time when it comes to work while underindexing on the variables of energy and timing. A simple example is that we schedule meetings based on time availability instead of optimal energy availability. After moving from Barcelona to LA, I began to consider the difference between these two questions.

[00:12:48]Rather than asking, when do I have time to do this task, which prioritizes the calendar arbitrarily, I would start to ask, when do I have optimal cognitive resources to do this task, which prioritizes your chronotype zone and your biology. And this brings us to a key concept that we call mastering energy arbitrage. Now, energy arbitrage is about leveraging the peak biological resources available only during your chronotype zone. It means you never squander this high energy, sharpminded period on tasks that don't significantly benefit from it. For example, in your chronotype zone, tasks like exercise, running errands, or picking up kids won't benefit from your chronotype zone cognition. But high impact, cognitively demanding work will, like building a financial model, writing a book chapter, or coding for 3 hours. The quality and creativity of your work on these tasks will be unmatched at any other time of day. For example, as a lark, an evening workout would be just as effective as a morning workout, give or take. Doesn't make a huge difference. It's just exercise. But an evening work session would be dramatically less effective. A third bird could do a 10 out of 10 work session in the early to midm morning in their chronotype zone. But routines like yoga and having a sauna or whatever it is would be done more or less as effectively at any other time even in the trough. Likewise a night owl may struggle with detail oriented tasks in the morning but blaze through these tasks easily in the evening. So the mantra here is don't squander optimal biology. Now once you master the fundamental idea of energy arbitrage, you need to know what to put in the trough versus your chronotype zone. Put anything that doesn't benefit from or require peak cognition in your trough, which is about 8 hours after waking for larks and thirds. Instead of doing difficult cognitive work, you can socialize, work out, or take a nap.

[00:14:42]Don't bother powering through with cognitively demanding work. Instead, recharge for the final push at the end of the day. And in certain cases, the trough actually counterintuitively can be useful for creative work that requires divergent thinking. If a task benefits from this kind of open-ended thinking like idea generation, mind mapping, or reviewing feedback, then even if it's cognitively demanding, you can experiment with doing it during the trough outside your chronotype zone.

[00:15:08]Now, next up, you want to extend your chronotype zone when the going gets tough. Once you train yourself to stop squandering optimal biology, you can learn to leverage optimal biology. For example, when you are facing big deadlines, you're stacked with work, that you're on the brink of overwhelm or burnout, extend your chronoype zone.

[00:15:27]Even if this means you have to get up earlier as a lark or stay up later as an owl, this is worth it because in our experience, having worked with thousands and thousands of clients on this, 1 hour spent working during your chronotype zone is worth up to 4 hours spent working during the trough in terms of output, what you actually accomplished.

[00:15:44]So think about that for a second. That means for every hour you work in the chronotype zone, you would have had to work 4 hours in the trough to get the same thing done. That's a 4:1 ROI on your productivity. So to ward off burnout during times of stress, it's non-negotiable to use every hour you have of your chronotype zone and cram all of your most important work into it.

[00:16:06]Then what we want to do is we actually want to start to rework our lives around our chronotype zone. Because once we get a taste of how well our body and physiology works at its biological prime, you'll see why it's crucial to rework your daily routine to protect this sacred chronotype zone at all costs. This means not letting distractions or even important activities encroach on your chronotype zone. For example, let's say you're an owl and your kids need to be brought to school at 6:00 a.m. Instead of sleeping through your chronotype zone to wake up early, have your partner handle the early morning routine in exchange for you handling household chores or hire a nanny if you have to. Whatever it is, if you're a lark and your job requires you to finish work at 10:00 p.m. So, you have to wake up late, sleeping through your chronotype zone, you may want to completely renegotiate with your boss or your team to make sure that you can finish at 5:00 p.m., get to bed at 9:00, and wake up at 4:00 a.m. knowing that's when you're going to harness peak cognition. If you're a third and meetings are cutting into your chronotype zone, aim to get the meetings rescheduled to the afternoon. You also may need to adjust your meal times to avoid a post lunch slump or to increase the hours in which you fast. With these adjustments made, here's a playbyplay of what an ideal day might look like for each chronotype. As a lark, personally, I go to bed around 9:00 p.m. and I wake up around 5:30 a.m. to ride that early chronotype zone wave, doing my most challenging work. Then around 11:00 a.m., I'll hit an energy dip and I'll go and do a workout. Then another wave hits and I get back into work. From 2:00 to 4 p.m. I'll eat, nap, walk, or do low priority tasks during the trough. At 4:30 p.m., my chronotype zone is now far behind me. So, I just wind up work and any other remaining tasks I have to do.

[00:17:50]Given that I've been able to accomplish so much earlier during the day in the chronotype zone, it's easy to stop earlier. Now, if you're a third bird, your chronoype zones between 8:00 a.m.

[00:17:59]and 10:00 a.m. So, in this case, you can dive into major work right away. Use 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. for key meetings or work that demands sharp analytical thinking. And once you hit the afternoon, trough around 300 p.m., transition into less cognitively demanding tasks, replying to emails, scheduling, or brainstorming. If you're an owl, embrace waking up at around 10:00 a.m. with zero guilt. Begin with a morning routine, whatever it is. Around noon, you may want to handle peripheral tasks like reading, scheduling, or meetings. Late afternoon to early evening is your chronoype zone. So fit your most important and cognitively demanding work here. While others wind down or socialize, you're the most active at work. So set boundaries to protect this window. These changes are worth it for the heightened total progress you'll gain from protecting and always working within your chronoype zone and keeping your most important work out of the trough. Personally, if I were to swap my schedule around and worked on my hardest tasks during the trough rather than my chronotype zone, even if I worked the same amount of hours, I would get about 25% of the work accomplished that I get accomplished now. It would also be incredibly unpleasant and bad for my physiology.

[00:19:07]I'm not even sure I would end up doing it consistently because of the unpleasant nature of it. Now, you understand at this point energy arbitrage. The next step is to energy surf within your chronotype zone.

[00:19:18]Because even within your chronotype zone, your biological rhythms do still have ups and downs, es and flows of cognitive resources and energy. Your chronotype sets the macro level of your energy and cognition. While other bio- rhythms create microlevel fluctuations, by syncing the macro with the micro, you make flow states and peak performance second nature. So, what are these micro shifts? Well, you've heard of circadian rhythms which regulate our sleep wake cycles, hormone release, and other physiological functions across a 24-hour cycle. But we also have two other bio-ythms. Inferred rhythms. These are biological cycles that last longer than 24 hours, like a woman's menstrual cycle, which occurs about every 28 days.

[00:19:58]And ultraadian rhythms are the biological cycles that occur more than once daily. One that we're really familiar with during sleep is REM. But these ultra radian rhythms also run in our physiology while we're awake.

[00:20:11]Alertness and hormone levels follow ultradian rhythms within the day as basic rest activity cycles. This means that even within your chronotype zone when you are at your peak you're still ebbing and flowing a little bit every 90 to 120 minutes. You will have these surges of energy followed by fatigue as part of your ultra radiant rhythms. And when you feel that physiological dip in energy, take a short little break to recharge rather than fighting uphill.

[00:20:38]Most people try to blast through these es in their cognitive resources which creates cortisol and stress, compromising their biology, wasting prime neurochemistry and leading to decreased effectiveness within the chronotype zone. Instead, to squeeze all the juice you can out of your chronotype zone when you do feel a little bit of fatigue pull back to surf your alterian rhythms. A way to remember this is BB.

[00:21:00]Burst, break, burst, break, burst intensely. Break completely. We're not saying you want to take a long coffee break here. Rather, just pull back and let your physiology recoup for as little as a minute or two to honor your old trading rhythms. However, how you take breaks matters. The right break will prolong your flow state and productivity. The wrong break will shut down momentum and snap you out of flow.

[00:21:24]The right brakes have two characteristics. Number one, they're low in cognitive stimulation. Number two, they're lower in cognitive stimulation than the task that you're working on.

[00:21:32]They don't result in the nucleus incumbent squirting dopamine into our system. The wrong breaks create a desire to do more of what you're doing in the break rather than a desire to go back to doing the work itself. Ideally, your break is more boring to the novelty seeking dopamine starved part of your brain than the work that you're breaking from. This makes it more appealing to re-engage in the task rather than to stay bored. So if you want more flow, be binary about this. Focus intensely while working during your chronotype zone.

[00:22:02]Then pull back a little bit even during the chronotype zone while focused on your highest priority work for a brief break. Without drawing these hard lines, you'll waste peak resources. Remember the surfing analogy. Even as you ride the great waves, during the great conditions, which are your chronoype zone, you need moments to catch your breath. Just like you need micro breaks to honor your ultra radian rhythms. This is how you ride the waves and avoid getting swallowed by its crash. Now, there's also a way to get even more out of your chronoype zone, and that is to leverage one of the most powerful substances that humanity has used to advance civilization. If you want to learn how and how to use this substance to push through the struggle phase rapidly into flow, click this link now.