- A calendar organized by project says nothing about the energy you have at each moment of the day.
- This article explains the hidden cost of switching between tasks, what David Kadavy suggests instead, and the mistakes that make batching fail.
- You leave with one action to take tonight: a single admin block, tomorrow, at the right time.
Tuesday, 9 a.m. Your calendar is already full: a project meeting, a quote to review, a follow-up call, three messages to handle before noon. On paper, the morning looks productive. By 11 a.m., you have written one line. The problem is not your discipline. Your calendar was built around one question: “what is urgent, and for which project?” It never asks the other one: “what kind of effort do I need right now?”
Most calendars sort work by project or by urgency. For tracking progress, that works. For knowing what your attention can give you at 9 a.m., 2 p.m. or 4 p.m., it tells you nothing. Reviewing a quote and facing a blank page to fill do not call for the same kind of thinking, yet they often end up side by side in the same morning.
This article suggests the reverse: sort work by cognitive mode, then place each mode where it has the best chance of holding. There is no magic recipe here. There is a mechanism, three questions to ask, a common mistake to avoid, and an action you can take tonight.
Why a full day rarely pays off
When you leave one task to open another, your brain does more than switch windows. It changes its rules, its goal and its context. Researchers call this task switching, and every switch has a cost: time to get back up to speed, and sometimes a few extra errors.
The costliest part is somewhere else. Sophie Leroy’s work on attention residue names the effect: part of your mind stays attached to the previous task even after you have opened the next one. You reply to a client, but half of your head is still on the launch plan you just closed. The minutes that follow make it visible: you read the same sentence three times, you open two more tabs, as this article on open tabs describes.
A calendar organized by project multiplies these switches. It schedules a meeting, then a creative task, then a quote, then another meeting, because that is where the deadlines fall. Each project looks coherent on its own. Across the day, the contexts trample each other.
What David Kadavy says, and what he does not
David Kadavy, author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, starts from a simple idea: productivity depends less on time than on how well you manage your mental energy, which is fragile. In the 2015 essay, Kadavy describes three questions to ask before starting: what work needs to happen now, what mental state am I in, and what can I do to get into the right one? Kadavy also explains choosing places by the work: a café high above the city for ideas, a small library room for editing.
What Kadavy does not offer is a ready-made list of modes. The breakdown that the course uses is a CMDglows synthesis, not a taxonomy from Kadavy. Keep the idea and drop the label: a task belongs to the effort it demands, not to the project it comes from.
The same essay gives a concrete lead: separate prioritization time from production time. Kadavy sets aside dedicated time for prioritizing and does the weekly review on Sunday evenings, when the energy to plan is high. That is not a detail. A good plan gets made in a state that serves planning, not in the middle of a meeting.
Nick Douglas, writing for Lifehacker, describes Kadavy’s typical week: mornings and Mondays for ideas, midweek for polishing an existing project, and Fridays for admin. You don’t have his freedom as a self-employed writer. The principle still holds: put creative work where your energy is high, and admin where it drops.
Three questions before you place a task
Before you put a task into a slot, answer three questions.
The first is about effort. A task that needs uninterrupted thinking, such as drafting a section, comparing two offers or building a plan, belongs to generation or exploration. A task that mostly needs steadiness, such as answering messages, filing invoices or approving a request, belongs to administration. Between the two sits coordination, which needs context without needing silence.
The second is about your state. This is not a question of willpower. It is a plain observation. If your mind is still on the meeting from twenty minutes ago, you are not ready for a creative task, even if your calendar says you are. The right slot is the one where you know you can show up.
The third is about what gets you there. Kadavy stresses places and rituals: a different room, a five-minute warm-up, a closed inbox. For you, the question is simpler: which context switch costs you the least? If you move from creating to a meeting with every window still open, you pay twice. A short handover note at the end of a block, as described in this article on keeping context between notes and actions, makes the restart faster.
These answers do not give you a pretty grid. They give you a decision: this task goes here, because it needs this, and you will be ready at that moment.
Batching, and where it stops
Batching means grouping tasks that need the same mode. The clearest gain comes from short, repetitive tasks. If you answer twenty messages in a row in the same state, you do not restart from zero twenty times. You do the work, then move on.
The limit is simple: not everything groups well. A negotiation, a repair or a difficult paragraph needs a context that does not share well with other tasks. Putting them in one block without a boundary creates an exhausting block. The better rule is to group by mode, not by project, and to keep room for the work that resists grouping.
There is also a benefit people overlook: a fixed admin slot lets fewer things slip through the cracks. A refund request that has waited three weeks is not forgotten; it is a task without a box. Giving it a box, even a small one, takes it out of your mental list.
Switching modes mid-stream has a hidden cost too. Changing task every few minutes costs more energy than staying with the task in progress: you reopen the tools, find the thread again, get back into the state. That is why I file whatever I find during one mode into that mode’s folder in my browser, and only reopen it when my calendar brings me back to that theme. The point is not to remember everything. It is to get the information out of your head, put it where it belongs, and go back to work with a quiet mind.
The mistakes that keep coming back
The first mistake is confusing urgency with mode. An urgent request can be an administrative task, not a creative one. Handling it right away, in your high-energy slot, gives your best moment to the least demanding work. Check what it actually requires before deciding it goes first.
The second is wanting a perfect week. A plan that never moves gets abandoned at the first busy Tuesday. It needs margin, and the weekly review should correct it, not rebuild it from scratch.
The third is trusting the ideal over observation. Many people schedule a creative morning when their mind only really wakes up around 11 a.m. For one week, note when your work comes out easily and when it stalls. The plan should follow what you observe, not what you wish you were.
What does not change
A block per mode does not make a week easy. If everything arrives as an emergency, no slot will hold. If your sleep was short, the morning has less capacity than a rested one, and your plan has to accept that instead of pretending otherwise. The method does not replace rest or sorting incoming requests. It stops you from spending your best moments on tasks that do not need them.
A few Windows settings can help protect the current mode, such as muting notifications during a block, but they stay secondary. The placement decision is what matters.
One action for tonight: the single admin block
Here is a complete action you can take tonight, without installing anything.
- Open your inbox, your task list and this week’s notes. Keep only the tasks that need no real thinking: replying, filing, paying, calling back, approving.
- Count them. Five to ten is enough to start. If you find twenty, several of them actually need coordination or thought, and they do not belong in this block.
- Block a single thirty-minute slot tomorrow. Pick a time when you do not have your peak focus, often late morning or after lunch.
- Place those tasks in the slot, in the order they arrived. Add nothing during the slot: whatever comes in waits for the next one.
- During the slot, close your main inbox and turn off notifications. The goal is one context, not answering everything at once.
- Tomorrow evening, note how many tasks are left. If many remain, the problem is not your plan but the volume, and that is a decision to make, not a failure.
This action needs no special tool. It tests one simple point: a large part of your day can be handled in one state, without constant switching. If it holds for a week, you have your first block. The rest can be placed afterward, using the three questions.
If the tiredness comes from the list itself rather than the schedule, also read why your to-do list drains you before you start.
What this changes for you
Start with this admin block. You do not need to redo your whole week: a thirty-minute slot is enough to see whether the principle holds. If you want to go further, the full version of this method is in the theme scheduling lesson of the Time and energy module, with a one-week observation exercise. For settings to change before you install anything, the free guide to 10 Windows settings comes next.
Sources
Figures and quotes checked on November 5, 2026.
See the 4 sources of this article
- David Kadavy (2015), Mind Management (Not Time Management), Medium
- David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management, book
- Nick Douglas (2019), Organize Your Schedule by Mental State, Not by Project, Lifehacker
- Sophie Leroy (2009), Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks, ScienceDirect