Happy Friday,

Sometimes, someone telling you about a book is better than reading it. Sometimes. In my case, several years ago, a Scrum Master had recently finished the book "When" by Daniel Pink and told me all about it, and his summary has stuck with me ever since.

Essentially, we have two basic modes throughout the time we're awake. One is when we are productive with structured work, and another is when we are creative. You can not only learn when those times are, but then take advantage of them by organizing your day around them. A way to look at these modes is in terms of what you have energy for. One mode you'll have energy for structured work, and the other you'll have energy for creative work and thinking.

I'll share how this looks for me as an example. My structured work modes are in the morning until about 10:00-11:00AM, and in the evening, I'll have another one sometime between 6:00PM and 9:00PM. During these times, I seem to have energy for chore-like tasks. This will be when I can best complete items on my to-do list.

The rest of the time is more creative. That means my mind tends to wander and is drawn to what is inspiring and exploring where that goes. If you've ever felt like you have the most creative ideas in the shower, this is what that time is like. The trick this time is to be able to take notes when an idea pops up quickly. This unstructured time often is the fuel and pre-work for my structured time.

Throughout the day, during my creative time, I'll often have many sparks pop up from topics to write on for my site, my newsletter, posts on LinkedIn, ideas to help the Beekeeping club, new activities to bring to teams, ways to handle recent scenarios, etc. I'll make a note about it. I tend to use Obsidian for a lot of my writing and notes lately. Before that, it was Google Keep. Then, when my productive time strikes, I can pull out my notes and make progress on one or more of those items.

This newsletter is a product of that process. Often, my ideas for what to write about happen way outside of the time I can sit and write. I just keep a list of ideas and topics, then in the morning I'll look at the list, pick the one that looks interesting, and start writing. You might be surprised to hear that I consider writing to be a structured task and not a creative one, but that is a topic for another day.

So what can you do with this information? Well, for many of us at 9-5 jobs, it can be hard to notice when we have these times and even harder to capitalize on them. For me, I tried to shift my days to put as much of my productive time to the morning, sometimes before 9AM, so I could accomplish my own things in the morning, and then during my creative time, I'd be available for other people, their meetings, etc. This suits me well as I will have accomplished several things before my day of meetings, and strangely enough, all those meetings tend to provide a lot of material for my unstructured and creative mind to work with.

Here's my weekly update for August 15th, 2025...

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Enjoy,

Ryan Latta