How to harness your window of peak efficiency

In this post, I want to explain how I increased my performance by changing my work hours in a day. Let me explain a bit about myself and what I do as a living.

The Problem

I am co-founder of Zoomzo Games. We are a game development company that makes casual / hyper-casual games for all platforms. We are a small team and because of that besides being a founder of the team, I also need to be a developer for the company. However, this helps me on keeping the track of the process and stay in the loop. But there is a handicap, I need to end a lot of tasks in a day.

My tasks are separated into 2 columns, founder tasks, and developer tasks;

1. Networking meetings, Accounting works of the company, Attending Fairs, Examining agreements, Preparing agreements, etc. are my founder tasks.
2. Developing features, Coding, Designing, Guiding interns, etc. are my developer tasks.

At first, it was frustrating but I came up with an idea on how to solve this issue.

Time Management

The first and main problem is time management. In the team, my colleagues always laugh at me when I say "I would finish this today if a day is 48 hours instead of 24". (And I mean it btw).

To fix this problem; I started giving numbers ( I call it the weight of the task) to the tasks in the morning meetings. The task weight can be something between 1 to 10. The most urgent tasks are always 10. So that when I take a look at my tasks I can realize what I need to do first. How do I decide on weights?

Two things are very important for me when assigning weights to the tasks.

1. When it should be finished?
2. Do I know how to solve it?

By giving weights to the tasks my brain is getting ready on doing these tasks. Imagine you are a gladiator and preparing yourself for the fight. It would be harder for you to get ready if you don't see the enemy before the fight begins.

Energy and Efficiency

The second problem is the energy to work on these things. Do I have the energy? I believe finding the peak of your energy is very important. What I did was a game-changer for me;

I tried changing my sleep schedule and by doing that I was trying to understand how do I feel waking up early, late, etc. Do I feel comfortable working when I wake up early or late? Do I have the energy to work on hard tasks in the evening or in the morning? When you think about it you might say that yeah I am comfortable doing that in the morning but I highly recommend you to try doing this experiment on yourself. I always thought I am a night owl but then I learned I am better at working in the morning by trying this method.

Force yourself to do the hardest task in different hours until you find the optimum. For example, I feel very unpleasant doing the hard task in the evening. Then I tried doing it in the morning and find out I can solve it much quicker. I even tried working at night but didn't get the output I was looking for.

Here are my notes to myself about increasing my efficiency:

• Give a break within 2 hours or else you are getting distracted. Your efficiency is decreasing.
• Hardest tasks can be solved easily in the morning or after lunch.
• If you have a meeting half an hour later give a break. Do not work before the meeting. Relax.
• If you are exhausted, music in the background will help you focus.
• Music can change the mood a lot. If I am working on a game project which supposes to have a happy mood having a piece of joyful music can increase the game's potential.
• Lighting the work environment is very important.
• Don't eat very oily products in lunch :D.
• Drink more water.
• Get up and walk for a minute, your legs and back need it.

These are what I find out about myself. Some of these might be useful to you but I suggest whoever reading this post should do this for themselves. Examine yourself. We are forgetting the fact that the human body is a machine and you need to take care of that machine if you want it to work properly.

Hopefully, this is useful to the community. I am always happy to help. Keep in touch!