I’ve tried every productivity system. GTD. Pomodoro. Time blocking. Bullet journaling. Apps with promises.

Five years in, here’s what actually works. No hacks. No secrets. Just boring truths.

The One Thing That Matters

Protect your mornings.

That’s it. That’s the whole system.

My best work happens between 6am and 11am. Deep thinking. Hard problems. Creative solutions.

Everything else can happen in the afternoon when my brain is mush.

I protect mornings ruthlessly. No meetings before 11am. No email until lunch. No Slack until I’ve done real work.

This single change was worth more than every productivity app combined.

What I Stopped Doing

Checking email first thing

Email feels productive. It’s not. It’s reactive. Other people’s priorities disguised as yours.

I batch email twice daily. 12pm and 5pm. The world survives.

Saying yes to “quick calls”

There are no quick calls. Every call has setup time, recovery time, and context-switching cost.

My default is no. “Send me an email” is a complete sentence.

Optimising my task list

I spent hours organising tasks. Colour coding. Priority levels. Tags.

Now I have a plain text file. Three items per day. If I finish those, good day. Everything else is bonus.

Multitasking

I was proud of juggling. Multiple screens. Multiple projects. Rapid switching.

It was all slow. Research confirms: every switch costs 20+ minutes of recovery.

One thing at a time. Always.

The Tools I Actually Use

Paper notebook: $8 Daily priorities. Meeting notes. Thinking space. No notifications.

Plain text file: Free Weekly goals. Today’s three items. Done.

Calendar blocking: Free My calendar shows what I should be doing right now. If it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t happen.

Timer: Free Focused work is timed. 90 minutes max. Then break.

Total cost: $8.

The Hard Truth About Founder Time

You don’t have time management problems. You have priority problems.

If you’re “too busy,” you’re doing low-value work. Or you’re doing other people’s work. Or you’re avoiding hard work with busywork.

The most productive founders I know do less. Fewer meetings. Fewer projects. Fewer commitments.

They pick the one thing that matters and ignore everything else.

My Actual Schedule

6:00am: Wake up. No phone. 6:30am: Deep work. Most important task. 9:00am: Break. Coffee. Brief email scan. 9:30am: Deep work continues. 11:00am: Meetings start (if necessary). 12:00pm: Lunch. Email batch 1. 1:00pm: Meetings, calls, reactive work. 5:00pm: Email batch 2. Plan tomorrow. 6:00pm: Done.

Eight focused hours beats twelve scattered hours.

What I Tell New Founders

1. Sleep 7+ hours. Non-negotiable.
2. Protect morning focus time.
3. Default to no on meetings.
4. One priority per day, not ten.
5. Stop reading productivity content.

That last one’s ironic given you’re reading this. But seriously. The answer isn’t in another article or app.

The answer is doing the work. Protecting the time to do the work. Saying no to everything else.

Simple. Not easy.