At Your Best
How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor
Book Edition Details
Summary
"At Your Best (2021) is a practical guide to moving beyond mere time management to win at work and home by aligning your time, energy, and priorities. Drawing on Carey Nieuwhof’s leadership experience and recovery from burnout, it shows how to replace chronic exhaustion with deep productivity, clarify what matters most, and master saying no to live a thriving life."
Introduction
You wake up each morning with good intentions, ready to tackle your important goals and spend quality time with the people who matter most. Yet somehow, by evening, you find yourself exhausted, having spent the entire day reacting to other people's urgent requests while your own priorities remain untouched. Sound familiar? You're not alone in this struggle. Millions of capable, ambitious people find themselves trapped in a cycle of overwhelm, constantly busy but rarely productive, always stressed but never truly fulfilled. The problem isn't that you're not working hard enough or that you lack time management skills. The real issue is that you're operating without a strategic understanding of how your energy naturally flows throughout the day and how to align your most important work with your peak performance hours. This approach will transform not just what you accomplish, but how you feel about your life and work. When you learn to do what you're best at during the hours when you're at your best, everything changes.
Escape the Stress Spiral and Take Control
The Stress Spiral is that downward cycle where unfocused time, unleveraged energy, and hijacked priorities leave you feeling perpetually overwhelmed, overcommitted, and overworked. Most people spend their days randomly tackling whatever comes their way, without any strategic thought about when they're most capable of doing their best work. Consider the story of a successful pastor who found himself sitting in his car outside his home one evening, dreading the thought of walking through the front door. Despite external success, he felt completely overwhelmed by the demands on his time and energy. He realized that everything was going well from the outside looking in, but internally, the pressure kept intensifying. His formula for handling growth was simple but destructive: more people equals more hours. He was cheating sleep, which made him feel simultaneously comatose and irritable most days. The breakthrough came when he recognized that the president of the United States has exactly the same number of hours in each day as everyone else. No more, no less. This realization forced him to confront an uncomfortable truth: he actually did have the time for what mattered most. He just wasn't taking it. Instead of continuing to live at an unsustainable pace, he decided to rebuild his approach entirely. The first step to escaping the Stress Spiral is recognizing that you have three primary assets every day: time, energy, and priorities. When you don't have an intentional strategy for managing these assets, they work against you rather than for you. The solution isn't to work more hours or try harder, but to focus your time, leverage your energy, and realize your priorities through strategic planning and boundary-setting. Start by telling yourself the truth about time. Instead of saying "I don't have time for that," acknowledge "I didn't make time for that." This simple shift in language forces you to take ownership of your choices and opens up possibilities for making different decisions in the future.
Master Your Green Zone for Peak Performance
Your Green Zone represents the three to five hours each day when your energy is high, your mind is clear, your focus is sharp, and you find it easy to think, contribute, and create. Most people have only this limited window of truly peak productivity each day, regardless of how many total hours they work. A former Twitter executive discovered that even the most brilliant Silicon Valley engineers have about three creative and highly productive hours daily. Similarly, medical research shows that anesthesiologists have adverse events about one percent of the time at 9 AM, but this rate rises to 4.2 percent at 4 PM. The difference isn't skill or dedication, it's the natural ebb and flow of human energy and focus throughout the day. The key breakthrough comes when you identify your personal Green Zone hours and protect them fiercely. One leader realized his Green Zone was between 7 and 11 AM. During this time, his stamina typically dipped late morning before lunch, so he would take a short nap after eating, which recharged him to about 85 percent for another hour or two. By 4 PM, it became difficult to focus on important tasks, and after 9 PM, he was essentially done for the day. To find your Green Zone, track both your productivity and mood throughout the day. Look for patterns in the quality of your ideas, your ability to focus, how quickly you complete tasks, and how you interact with others. Your Green Zone is characterized by creativity, alertness, engagement, efficiency, and a positive, generous mood. Map your energy patterns on a twelve-hour clock, marking your Green Zone hours, Yellow Zone moderate energy periods, and Red Zone low-energy times. Once you identify these patterns, you can begin to schedule your most important work during your peak hours rather than leaving it to chance or squeezing it into leftover time slots when you're already depleted.
Protect Your Priorities from Daily Hijacking
Your priorities get hijacked every single day because everyone who calls, texts, or asks for your time is trying to move their priorities onto your agenda. Nobody will ever ask you to accomplish your top priorities. They will only ask you to accomplish theirs. This dynamic means that without a clear strategy for protecting what matters most, you'll spend your entire day responding to other people's urgent requests while your important work remains undone. A communications leader discovered this pattern when analyzing a typical workday. He started early to write an article, but ended up opening multiple browser tabs, watching YouTube videos, responding to texts, checking social media, and engaging in impromptu conversations with colleagues. By 4:17 PM, he had accomplished almost nothing on his original agenda, despite being busy all day. The solution lies in understanding the difference between urgent and important tasks. Most people spend 80 percent of their time on activities that produce only 20 percent of their results. The goal is to flip this ratio by identifying the 20 percent of activities that produce 80 percent of your outcomes, then scheduling these high-yield activities during your Green Zone hours. Master the art of saying no by following a five-step process: tell people you'd love to help them, express empathy for their situation, be firm in your decline, redirect them to someone who might be better suited to assist, and thank them for thinking of you. This approach maintains relationships while protecting your boundaries. Implement categorical decision-making by eliminating entire groups of activities or requests from your calendar. Instead of making individual decisions about each opportunity, create categories of things you simply don't do. This might include certain types of meetings, specific kinds of events, or particular audience compositions that don't align with your core objectives. Practice this protection strategy by scheduling your priorities ahead of time, treating them as immovable appointments with yourself. When someone asks what you're doing at a particular time, you can honestly say you have a commitment without needing to explain that the commitment is to your most important work or relationships.
Build Your Thrive Calendar for Lasting Success
The Thrive Calendar is your ultimate weapon against a hijacked schedule. It's a fixed calendar that represents your predecisions about how to spend both your work and personal time, most often expressed through repeating appointments with yourself, week after week, year after year. Blank space on your calendar is a trap that looks like freedom but actually guarantees that other people will determine how you spend your time. Ernest Hemingway exemplified this principle by writing every morning as soon after first light as possible. He would work until he came to a place where he still had his creative energy and knew what would happen next, then stop and live through until the next day when he would return to his writing. This disciplined approach to using his peak hours for his most important work helped him become one of the world's most celebrated authors. To create your Thrive Calendar, start by revisiting your Energy Clock and syncing your zones with your most important priorities and people. Your top three to five relationships might get Green Zone time, while your broader circle of twelve to fifteen important people might receive Yellow Zone attention. Tasks should be similarly categorized, with your highest-impact work scheduled during peak energy hours. Design repeating appointments that protect time for developing your gift, working on your business rather than just in it, connecting with family, nurturing your spiritual life, spending time with your best people, and doing your least energizing work when you're least energetic. This creates sustainable patterns that run automatically without requiring constant decisions about how to spend your time. The calendar should reflect your whole life, not just work commitments. Block time for date nights, family activities, exercise, rest, and personal growth. When someone asks about your availability during these protected times, you can simply say you have a commitment. Healthy people will respect these boundaries, while unhealthy people who push back reveal their own issues rather than problems with your system. Signs that your Thrive Calendar is working include accomplishing your priorities consistently, getting better at what you do, loving meetings again because you're with the right people, having time for yourself and family, and feeling genuinely happier about your life and work.
Summary
Living at your best isn't about perfection or working more hours, it's about working strategically during your peak energy windows and protecting what matters most from the constant demands of an overwhelmed world. As the research clearly shows, when you focus your time, leverage your energy, and realize your priorities, you create a virtuous cycle that helps you thrive rather than merely survive. The goal is to live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow, building sustainable patterns that serve both your professional effectiveness and personal fulfillment. The transformation isn't just about what you accomplish, it's about who you become when you're no longer constantly stressed and depleted. Start today by identifying your Green Zone hours and scheduling one important priority during that time. Your future self will thank you for making this simple but powerful change, and you'll discover that you have far more control over your time and energy than you ever imagined possible.
By Carey Nieuwhof
