Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
⠀
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
⠀
🙋♀️ Paige’s tired hours
Paige is a marketing manager who’s building a course on the side, teaching small bakeries how to find local customers.
Her course gets whatever hours are left after the day job, and by then she’s too tired to think.
She sits down at nine at night, stares at the lesson plan for an hour,
and writes half a page she deletes the next day.
So she decides she needs more discipline,
and pushes her bedtime back to make room for more of the same hours.
🧩 Her struggle:
She thinks she needs more hours, so the course only ever gets her tired ones.
On her lunch break, she’s reading a newsletter that tells the true story of a writer
who kept noticing that the people at their desks the longest weren’t the ones getting the most done,
and whose book about it sold more than three million copies.
His book sold three million copies, all about one simple idea.
⠀
🔋 The man who ran the experiment inside a bank
Tony Schwartz split a group of bank employees in two and gave them the same number of hours.
One group worked in short, focused stretches with genuine breaks in between.
The other did what everybody does, and pushed straight through.
Both groups worked the same number of hours.
Get this — the sprint-and-rest group produced more, and finished far less wrecked.
Tony had spent years writing about high performers before that, and kept running into the same thing.
The people producing the most work were not the people at their desks the longest.
So he founded a company called The Energy Project, which now coaches Google, Coca-Cola and other very large firms on this one idea.
His book The Power of Full Engagement has sold more than three million copies.
His argument starts with a correction.
Time is a fixed resource, and everyone gets the same twenty-four hours.
Energy isn’t fixed.
It rises and falls through the day, and it can be spent, drained and deliberately refilled.
So what matters is how much energy you had in those hours, not how many hours you found.
His word for that push-and-rest cycle is oscillation.
He’s blunt about the alternative: “Linearity ultimately leads to dysfunction.”
Grinding all day eventually breaks you.
⠀
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Energy Audit
Tony proved inside a bank that sprint-and-rest beats grinding, in the same number of hours.
This hack is called The Energy Audit.
He didn’t give the group that did best any more hours than the other group.
He changed how the hours were used: short focused stretches, with real breaks between them.
So you stop hunting for more hours and start guarding the good ones you already have.
The audit is one week of marking each block of your day out of ten for how sharp you felt.
Score how sharp and energetic you felt, not how much you got done.
The highest blocks are the only ones the side project gets.
One good hour beats four tired ones.
⠀
🛠️ Paige’s turn
Remember Paige, and the bakery course she only works on at nine at night, when she’s too tired to think?
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and gives it her day, block by block, with a score out of ten for how sharp she feels in each one.
Her AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Your sharpest hours are six to eight in the morning, so give those to the course, not nine at night.
The next morning, she sits down with the lesson plan at six.
By eight, she has written two pages, and she keeps both of them.
⠀
🌅 Six weeks later
Paige works on the course from six to eight every morning, and never after nine at night.
Four lessons are finished,
and she hasn’t deleted a page since.
The hours you already have are enough, as long as they’re your sharp ones.
Give your side project your sharpest hours, not the ones left over.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below reads your day block by block and tells you which one the side project
should live in — and what has to move out of the way.
🧰 What you’ll need
Your day, block by block, with a score out of ten for how much energy you have in each
- A guess is fine. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. 6-8am: 8. 9-12: 7, but it all goes to work. 12-2: 4. 2-6: 6. 7-9pm: 3. 9-11pm: 2, and this is when I try to buildWhat you’re building outside your job, and what you do in your best block now
- e.g. a course for small bakeries on finding local customers, and my best hours go to email and scrolling the newsWhat gives you energy back, what only feels like rest, and what you can’t move
- e.g. a walk with no phone restores me, scrolling in bed does not, and the school run at 8:15 cannot move
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my course outline, my lesson drafts, or my sales page, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume owners of small bakeries who want more customers from their own neighborhood.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Do not tell me to wake up earlier or to want it more. Work only with the energy described below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My day, block by block, with how much I have out of ten in each:
{e.g. 6-8am: 8. 9-12: 7, but it all goes to work. 12-2: 4. 2-6: 6. 7-9pm: 3. 9-11pm: 2, and this is when I try to build}
The thing I am building outside the job, and what I currently do in my highest-energy block:
{e.g. a course for small bakeries on finding local customers, and my best hours go to email and scrolling the news}
What restores me, what I have been mistaking for rest, and what I cannot move:
{e.g. a walk with no phone restores me, scrolling in bed does not, and the school run at 8:15 cannot move}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My real peak — which block has the most energy, based only on the numbers I gave, not on what I assumed.
2. The swap — exactly what has to move out of that block, and what it costs me to move it.
3. The week, rewritten — my blocks with the side project in the right one, inside what I said I cannot move.
4. The fake rest — which of my current breaks is draining me further, and what replaces it.
5. The stop signal — how I will know I am at the end of a stretch before I am empty, rather than after.
Then tell me the ONE hour this week that I have been wasting my best energy on.