A starting guide to better performance pacing

Do you know when you do your best work?

Do you know when you’ve hit your peak when it comes to your performance?

Don't panic, not too many people do think about this - but in my experience, it's essential to ongoing sustainable high performance in business settings.

Performance is not just about what you do, but in also how you approach your work.

And something that we often don’t realise, is how we pace for performance is really powerful.

Here are three ways you can build performance pacing into how you design your work - which once you’ve mastered, you can then lead out to your team

#1 Work to your chronotype

Early birds, night owls - our circadian rhythms are unique, but follow patterns. And that means, some of us will do our best work between 6 am and 10 am, others between 6 pm and 10pm and some of us somewhere else in between.

Fortunately for us earlier birds, most of the working world agrees with that (however, we often then fill that with coffee and email, or meetings!)

And then for the night owls, we’re expected to be winding down, or berated for being online after hours.

What often happens, is that we use our best time in dumb ways (not deliberately!)

We are in meetings in the morning, fighting fires in the afternoon, then logging back on once home to do the actual work - and alas, if you’re an early bird, this is when you’re brain is actually closing up for the day. This means you’re hustling and have hit what is known as a point of diminishing returns.

Or, as a night owl, you’re being told off for being “always on” (but actually, you secretly want to be cranking, and so you should!)

Hustling all hours doesn’t set you up for peak performance. Less work, done at the right time, will definitely create better work and takes less effort. (meaning, you’re less of a grumpy tired twit later in the week)

So here’s the permission slip: work out when you do your best work, and carve out space as often as possible to do your heaviest mental lifting work in that time block. Give your people that chance as often as possible. Try problem solve for what that could look like, together.

Great thinkers in this space include Daniel Pink (his book When is an excellent starting point for people new to this and his YouTube channel has zillions of amazing ideas) or Cal Newport (his new book Slow Productivity has some great lessons on working at a natural pace and his podcast includes listener questions for some great insights into application of his ideas)

#2 : 90 minutes is the upper end of human focus

Good performance needs a break.

This is why the pomodoro technique works well. It’s also why team sports has a half time and break again if they go into extra time. We, as humans, have a threshold for our stamina. And our focus is, for most of us, our most important asset to doing good work.

Be conscious of time blocking, and know that while 90 minutes is the upper end - to start with, you may have a much lower starting point.

Shape your week days up with bursts of focus and what Cal Newport coined “deep work” , being aware of your need for a rest. Use that rest for a state change (new room, outside, 10 star jumps, walk to the loo and use the stairs etc).

We often underestimate what a solid 40 minutes of focus will do for a long standing to do list task.

By monitoring your focus, protecting it, and then reviewing how long you actually take to do things, you’ll see your efforts become more effective based on using your time more efficiently.

But, this isn’t easily done, and you need to create the conditions for it.

Turn off push notifications, set an email out of office, set expectations with those you’re working with.

My recommendation would be to start small, feel the reward, then increase over time.

Also, as the old saying “eat the frog” goes - do the hard thing first, and I’m gonna bet it will take less time when you actually get into doing mode than you were hyping it up in your head ??

Habit change is hard, habit change to craft better focus (in a world of pings, slack notifications, emails and watches that buzz every few moments with something new) is blinking hard.

My free recommendation here is get started with Focusmate - which gives you 3 free sessions a week. Or, join us over for weekly Monday coworking with other business owners at Your Business Club by Your Success Team . At ~$2.50 a co-working session, the ROI is massive.

#3: Discipline and consistency can often create pacing (and actually make life easier)

In most large organisations, there’s a crafted cadence. The expectations of what will be done, when.

For example, the start of shifts in a hospital have a consistent pattern and set of tasks. This not only helps set the stage for workers, but also removes mental friction because our brains like a pattern. We learn “oh, this happens, then I do this”

It’s actually doing ourselves a favour when we make a decision, and create the conditions for us to do thing consistently.

Often, people push back and say “but this isn’t for me!” and that’s cool, I love intuition and it has a massive role to play in life and in business.

However, we create MORE space for our intuition and genius to flourish when it’s in a rhythm that works best for us.

So please, persist, start small, and give discipline and consistency some slack - they’re actually here to help!

A great idea is to pick what a start of day and end of day ritual might look like.

Is it closing down your browser and turning the computer off (this is a massive mental benefit for me!), or saying bye to the team as you head out? Is it a text message to check in with your 2IC? Is it writing your first big focus or task for tomorrow on a small post it and leaving it on your screen?

Another one that my clients have loved over the years is to pick a theme for each day’s focus: e.g Fire Fighting Monday, CEO mode Tuesday, CFO Wednesday, People Thursday, Networking Friday.

How ever many work days you have, having a core focus for a segment of each day will make you more focussed, more consistently, and that will generate better performance in time (there’s even bonus points if you want to alliterate it for even more mental ease! )

We have a great resource to plan your ideal rhythm you can get your hands on as a member of Your Business Club - for a $10 investment, your future self will thank you for doing it!

You do you - but the ease of a familiar pattern is one our brains respond really well to, and you’ll be amazed at just how quickly you’ll see a shift even with a small start.

So there you have it: three zones of performance pacing that may have been some of the missing ingredients in your business performance.

My hope is that you can take one or two, give them a go, then come back to this and go again.

It’s also why, in my work with clients, my focus is on both the design of your business performance visibility, but also in the pacing for how you use it.

The creation of new muscle memory, habit formation, behaviour change.

Nothing works as well if we’re not pacing for it in the right way.

We’re humans, not robots, and we need to remember that with how we set ourselves, and our team up for success!

Ready to get stuck into looking at how you pace your business performance?

Let’s book a time to chat more and see if I’m a good fit for what you need to be working on right now.