Work in waves, not walls

Discipline is keeping a beat when nobody is clapping

We keep trying to work like server farms, but we’re animals.

Energy rises and falls in tides. You ebb and flow, ignore that and your work turns to mulch.

The neuroscience enriched magic number is ninety, and this should be the dimensions of your working blocks. Strap your feedback on, saddle up, pick a lane, and use another metaphor or two if need be to understand that you’re doing one thing for the next hour and a half.

Then between those blocks you take real breaks that look and feel like a break. You eat, you walk, you have some water and get some daylight. You enable your mind to wander, feel inspired and most importantly rest and reset. Then you do it again twice more. Between blocks you fit in a meeting or two, get your admin sorted and scroll Pinterest on the toilet. That’s a working day.

Thought work burns fuel the same way training does. No recovery, no progress. Athletes periodise, kids do it naturally. Try. Rest. Grow. For some reason the office bro world forgot this and started awarding medals for sleeping in your car at lunchtime and staying until half seven at night to make sure you get to zero inbox.

Structure helps. If you have worked with me, you’ll know all about my post-it notes with lists of three tasks for the morning and three for the afternoon.

Every morning, midday and close of play, I review the lists, update them, and if anything has been delayed or shuffled to a different place in the list, update those it’s impacted.

Every night I go to bed knowing what I’m doing the following morning, so my brain doesn’t burn its glucose in the first twenty minutes of work deciding what to do.

There’s a rhythm to seasons, too. There are weeks where you’re spread thinner than Patum Peperium on warm buttered toast, and weeks where you can take a long lunch and indulge your curiosity in a section of Waterstones you’ve not previously entered before.

And you need those long meandering walks through places you find curious, as you only get out what you put in. Culture does not live nor inspire in Excel sheets on your Macbook Air in Costa at 10am. You cannot optimise a life the way you optimise an ad set. You also can’t make anything original without a season in the burrow where nobody is watching.

Neurodivergent brains often feel this more sharply. ADHD thrives on a clean runway and a sprint with a visible end, autistic cognition does its best work with predictable slots and decompression after social load. This approach is good design for everyone.

If you want one rule, it’s this: work in waves.

One lane per wave. Know where you’re starting before the start. Close the loop at the end. Then actually rest. Walk. Lift. Eat. Sleep.

Keep the rhythm long enough and the work starts compounding, the routine becomes habitual. Break it to stay up late working on mindless decks and you don’t become a hero, you become tired and mid, with an insatiable hunger for bed.

Discipline isn’t acting like you have infinite energy.
Discipline is keeping a beat when nobody is clapping.