Third Shelf

On Productive Flourishing I found another useful tool. A productivity heat map. A really intuitive way of discovering your optimal productivity times.

How it works: It’s simply a circle with the hours of the day marked on the outside and divided into into slices. Time slices if you want. The idea is to colour in the time slices or partial time slices with colours that indicate the level of your productivity for a given 24-hour period.

The author suggests the following four colours, from most productive to sleep: red, orange, yellow, green and gray. I unfortunately did not have that many highlighters at hand, so I had to make use of only three. Here, is how I used them:

Green: The time where I was surfing the net, reading blogs and drinking coffee or eating lunch.

Yellow: Period where I was concentrating on certain tasks but not sold out to a specific task.

Orange: In the zone and totally lost and focused on the task at hand. For me, this lasts around 2 hours.

I found the results rather interesting and now know when to schedule mundane tasks and when to sit down and wipe out a task. So, go ahead and download the blank heatmap template.