Yesterday afternoon I tuned in to a webinar—”We took the planner pages you’ve been using for years and overhauled them, so we thought we’d give you a tour to ease your resistance to change.” Very true, very wise and thoughtful…and not necessary in my case, because I picked them up last week and thought, “Wow. These are even more intuitively laid out than before!” I tuned in anyway; one never knows when one will discover something new. Maybe it was a conditioned response, since I participated in co-working webinars with these folks for a six-month stretch, but even without new information I’m jazzed up about enhancing the rhythm of my days.

(“Enhancing the rhythm” overstates how I continue to feel about my day-structure. If you’ve been following along here, you know this, but other phrases weren’t working.)

See, we started talking about Productive Flourishing’s Two-Hour Rule. If you create things, including presentations for clients or project plans, the original post is more than worth a read, but the pinky-nail summary is that two hours is a scheduling sweet spot. It’s enough time to dig into the material and get in a groove, but not challenging or impossible to schedule, the way “I’m going to take a day away from the office and work on this!” is. Charlie calls these “creative blocks.”

We were also talking about personal rhythms (early birds, night owls, afternoon emus??), and it occurred to me that as a robin* I would be wise to take a morning block for writing, perhaps in addition to the afternoon block that’s become more usual for me. Said another way—more accurately, scribbled on my page of notes—what if I’m bi-modal?

<shrug> It’s worth running the experiment. Maybe it’ll even be fun-! And this right here is part of the first data point.

* Robin: I wake up -in the morning-, but it takes me a few hours to get myself pulled together sufficiently to work coherently. Like three. Heck, I spend an hour at the breakfast table with coffee and the newspaper…my eating part takes maybe 15 minutes!

** “Full days are unicorns.” Direct Charlie Gilkey quote from the webinar! It made me laugh, so it’s now on a note above my computer. Maybe that’s a title for another work: “Full Days, Unicorns, and Other Magical Thinking.”