How to structure your workday, with two sample day plans

To structure your workday, put your hardest work in the hours when you think best, group meetings and messages into a few blocks instead of letting them spread across the day, fix your breaks and lunch at set points, and end at a set time. That gives you a frame you can repeat every day and adjust when the day goes sideways.

The details depend on two things: when you are sharpest, and how much of your day belongs to other people. Below is how to find your best hours, the pieces every workday plan needs, two sample days (one for early risers, one for night owls) and how to keep the plan alive once the week fills up.

Start with your best hours

Most people have a stretch of a few hours when hard thinking feels easier. For many it is mid-morning. For night owls it can be late afternoon or evening. Research on chronotypes suggests people really do differ in when they are most alert, so copying someone else's ideal routine often fails for a simple reason: it was built around their best hours, not yours.

If you don't know your best hours, find them in a week:

1. At the end of each working hour, give yourself a score from 1 to 5 for how sharp you felt.
2. Note what you were doing, since a dull meeting can drag down a good hour.
3. After five days, look for the two or three hours that score highest most days.

Those hours are where your most important work goes. The writer Cal Newport popularized the phrase "deep work" for this kind of focused, demanding work, and the main idea is simple: guard a few hours for it and don't let small tasks leak in.

Many people also slow down in the early afternoon, often after lunch. If that's you, don't fight it with your hardest task. Give it to email, admin and calls that need less from you.

What should a workday schedule look like?

Whatever your hours, a workday that holds together usually has the same five pieces.

• A short plan at the start. Five or ten minutes to check the calendar and pick the one task that matters most today. Plan your day in five minutes has a simple routine for it.
• One or two deep work blocks in your best hours, each 60 to 120 minutes, with the door closed and notifications quiet.
• Meetings grouped together, ideally in one part of the day, so they don't break every block into pieces.
• Messages at set times. Two or three passes through email and chat beat keeping them open all day.
• Breaks, lunch and a hard stop, put on the plan like any other block, because they are the first things to go when they aren't.

The essayist Paul Graham described this as the difference between a maker's schedule and a manager's schedule. A manager's day can be cut into hour-long slots without much harm. A maker, someone writing, designing or building, needs half days at least, because a single meeting in the middle of the afternoon can ruin the whole of it. Most people at a Mac are a bit of both, and grouping meetings is how you give the maker half a chance.

Two sample day plans

These are starting points, not prescriptions. Shift the times to fit your job, your commute and your household.

An early riser

A night owl

If your workplace has fixed hours, the night owl version still works inside them. Put the people-facing work first and save the hard thinking for later in the day, when your head catches up.

How do you fit meetings around focus time?

Meetings are where most day plans fall apart, usually because they land in the middle of the only open morning.

• Pick meeting hours. Decide that meetings go in one part of the day, or on certain days, and steer invitations there. Offering two times inside your meeting hours works better than waiting to be offered one.
• Block focus time on your calendar. A morning with nothing on it looks open to everyone. A block called "Draft the proposal" is harder to give away. Time blocking in the Mac Calendar app shows how to set that up.
• Leave buffers. Five or ten minutes between meetings lets you write down what was agreed, refill your water and arrive at the next one with your head clear.
• Batch small requests. Quick questions can wait for your next message pass, unless they are truly urgent.

Where do breaks and lunch go?

Put them on the plan at fixed points, because a break you mean to take "when there's a moment" rarely gets one.

• A short break every hour or so. Stand up, refill your water, stretch, look across the room. Five minutes is enough. Longer focus blocks need one in the middle.
• Lunch at about the same time each day, for at least half an hour, away from the screen if you can. A lunch eaten over email isn't much of a break.
• A longer pause mid-afternoon. A walk outside is the best version. It lands neatly on the afternoon dip.

These breaks are what keep you useful at four in the afternoon, not just at ten in the morning.

How do you end the workday?

Pick a finishing time and treat it as a fixed appointment. Without one, the day ends when you run out of energy, which is usually later than you meant and with less done than you hoped.

A short shutdown routine makes stopping easier:

1. Check the calendar for tomorrow, so nothing early surprises you.
2. Write down the first task for tomorrow morning, where you'll see it.
3. Close the apps and tabs you won't need, and close the laptop lid or step away from the desk.

Ten minutes is plenty. A shutdown ritual to end your workday has a fuller version if you want one. The point is a clear line between working and not working, especially when your desk is at home.

Where Notchpals fits

Notchpals won't plan your day. What it adds is a handful of well-timed knocks from the notch at the points in the frame above that usually slip.

With a Focus character such as Jot, a sticky note, in your crew, a Plan the day visit arrives once on weekday mornings, somewhere between 8:30 and 11. That is where the five minute plan belongs:

JotPick one thing that matters. I'll stick it right where you can see it.

A Meals character times lunch around the lunch hour you set in Settings, so it can match the lunch block in your plan. A Movement character gets you out of the chair after nearly an hour of sitting, which keeps the short hourly breaks honest. With calendar access allowed, a Schedule character looks at start times only (not titles or attendees) and turns up a few minutes before each meeting.

The same Schedule character handles the hard stop. On weekdays it comes by once in the early evening, between 6 and 7:30, to call time on work. Honey, a honey badger who is not sweet and will fight your deadline, takes that job personally:

HoneyEvening. The inbox can wait. I'll stand guard over it. Go.

If your day ends before six, treat the visit as a check that you really did stop.