How Should Founders Protect Their Best Hours for Deep Work?
Andrew Huberman says founders should learn the hours when their mind is sharpest and protect those hours as the most important times of the day, aside from family emergencies. Daisy Wolf asks for three evidence-based habits for cognitive performance, and the first is knowing those windows. His windows are about 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and again from about 4:35 p.m. until about 7 p.m. Exercise before 9 a.m. gives him energy for the rest of the day. Exercise at 11 a.m., inside the morning peak, leaves him exhausted by 3 in the afternoon. He does not get paid to exercise, so the workout stays outside the work block.
Health protocols have to support the rest of life, including the company. Packing every protocol into the day just depletes people. Most people can hold about two focused blocks, on the order of three hours and then another two or three, not eight or nine hours of real focus. Losing one block costs more than the clock time. Work done in those three or four hours is exponentially more productive than catch-up later, and a broken block also crowds out a personal life.
He calls the blocks workabouts and thinks of real work as a fight. Rick Rubin eases into the day and does his hardest work in the afternoon, when his mind is sharpest, then tapers in the evening. The hours differ by person and can change. The task is to know them and guard them.
