You know the object well.
It sits on your desk or gathers dust in a drawer—a pristine, leather-bound planner. You bought it in January, fueled by a surge of “New Year, New Me” optimism. You color-coded the first week. You filled out the first few days with military precision, maybe revisited it here and there throughout the year.
And now? It’s a new year and page after page more empty pages than filled.
If you are like the clients I work with, that empty planner doesn’t just represent wasted money. It feels like a silent accusation.
It whispers that you are undisciplined, disorganized, or simply incapable of “adulting” correctly. You look at others—the “Planner People”—who seem to breeze through life with their checklists and bullet journals, and you wonder: What is wrong with my brain?
There is nothing wrong with you.
The failure isn’t a character flaw; it is a systemic mismatch. You are trying to apply a linear, time-based solution to a dynamic, energy-based problem.
The empty planner isn’t a sign of laziness; it is a symptom of Cognitive Overload.
Let’s dismantle the myth of time management and replace it with a system that actually honors your psychology.
Time is Finite, Energy is Renewable
The corporate world and traditional self-help gurus are obsessed with Time Management. They teach us to slice our 24 hours into 15-minute increments, treating our day like a pie chart to be maximized.
But time is finite. We all get the 24 hours in a day, 1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. You cannot create more of it. No matter how efficiently you color-code your calendar, the clock moves at the same speed.
We need to STOP managing time and start managing Energy.
Unlike time, energy is renewable. It fluctuates. It has a cadence. When you stare at a planner with 20 blank lines for a single day, your brain doesn’t see “opportunity.” It sees a threat. It sees a massive demand on your executive function before you’ve even had your morning coffee.
If you have tendencies toward ADHD or simply a high-stress lifestyle, a blank page is paralyzing. It triggers a “freeze” response. You avoid the planner because the planner demands energy you haven’t cultivated yet.
The Biological Rhythm
So, if we can’t add more time to our day, we can only adjust our energy so we can continue to become more efficient with our time. And in neuro-psychology, we have a system for just that – The Ultradian Cycle. Hacking your natural rhythm is the answer to accomplishing more from your day and using less energy.
The Ultradian Rhythm (The 90/30 Rule)
We are not machines; we are biological organisms. Our brains are hardwired for Ultradian Rhythms—cycles of high-frequency output followed by necessary recovery. Many of us, myself included, abuse this system rather than working with it. When we’re working, it feels like giving up to get up from the desk and take a break, but that is exactly what we need to do so our mind can recover from high – intensity work.
Here’s what you do:
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The Sprint: You can perform at high capacity for about 90 minutes.
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The Throttle Down: After that, your brain requires 15 to 30 minutes of rest to recover.
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The Consequence: If you push past this 90-minute window (multitasking or grinding through), you enter a state of “diminished goods.” You are sitting at your desk, but your cognitive engine is stalling. A waste of your energy and time – thus ending up creating a backlog of tasks to complete.
Energy Management Hack: The Two-Hour Block
Practice harnessing the Two-hour block, 90 minutes of productivity and 30 minutes of rest. It can look however you want, but my favorite is 15 minutes of prep; 90-minutes of deep focus; 15 mins of walking away, and repeat. This allows me to get my water, open files/email, check my phone, etc. then jump into the deep focus task for 90-minutes; and set a timer to step away (mid-work even) at that mark.
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The Math: If you sleep for 8 hours (4 blocks), you have roughly 8 blocks (16 hours) left for your life and work.
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The Application: Dedicate a block to a specific energy output. 90 minutes of deep work, followed by 30 minutes of “grace”—walking, stretching, or doing nothing. This respects your biology rather than fighting it.
The Post-It Note Constraint
When the blank pages of a planner feels overwhelming that because we haven’t built our bandwidth for it. Starting with a simple post-it note can remove that barrier to entry into energy and time management. Instead of having 20 lines of empty lines, I have a 3×3 Post-It note. Why does this work?
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Visual Limitation: A Post-It note can physically hold only about three lines of text. This forces ruthless prioritization.
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Reduced Anxiety: A small square of paper feels temporary and manageable. A leather-bound book feels permanent and judgmental.
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The Dopamine Loop: Completing three tasks on a sticky note gives you a 100% completion rate for the day. Completing three lines in a 20-line planner looks like an 85% failure rate. Your brain needs that dopamine hit of “Success!” to reinforce the habit.
The Mental Weight Room
Think of your ability to plan and execute tasks like weight training.
If you walked into a gym for the first time in ten years, would you attempt to bench press 300 pounds?
Of course not. You would tear a muscle. Yet, this is exactly what we do with our productivity. We buy a complex planner (the 300lb weight) and expect our brain (the untrained muscle) to lift it immediately.
When you fail to fill out the planner, it’s not because you are weak; it’s because you haven’t built the bandwidth.
Start with the 5 lb weight: The Post-It Note. Once you can lift that consistently (completing 3 tasks a day), you build the mental strength to handle a larger list. Eventually, after “reps” and “sets,” you may graduate to a full page. But you cannot skip the training phase.
Perfectionism is Self-Sabotage
Why do we resist these small steps? Why do we prefer the drama of the “all-nighter” or the adrenaline of the last-minute deadline?
Perfectionism.
There is a toxic comfort in procrastination. If you wait until the night before to write a paper or finish a project, you have a built-in excuse: “It’s not perfect, but I only had 12 hours.”
Procrastination is a defense mechanism.
It protects your ego from the fear that your best effort might not be good enough. By delaying, you control the narrative.
But this is a systemic emotional failure. It keeps you in a cycle of high stress (cortisol spikes) followed by burnout. It reinforces the belief that you only work well under pressure, which is false. You work under pressure because you haven’t built a system that allows you to work in peace.
The “Good Enough” Shift: We must embrace the Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule). 80% of the value comes from 20% of the effort. Chasing that final 20% of “perfection” usually costs 80% of your energy. It is rarely worth the return on investment, if you have the time, energy, and desire to get it to 85%; then go for it, but don’t chase perfection and burnout your energy and waste your time. It’s rarely worth it.
Throttling Down to Speed Up
If you take nothing else from this, remember: Your time is your most precious currency. Stop spending it on guilt over empty notebooks.
Success isn’t a filled calendar.
Success is ending the day feeling like you honored your commitments without bankrupting your mental health.
It is okay to be a “Post-It Person” in a world of “Planner People.” In fact, it might just be the smarter strategy.
Your Micro-Step
The Post-It Purge:
Take a standard sticky note (3×3).
Write down three tasks you must do tomorrow. Not five. Not ten. Three.
Stick it to your phone screen or your laptop monitor.
The Rule: You are not allowed to add a fourth item until those three are crossed out.
If you finish them by noon? Celebrate. You’ve just had a successful day. Everything else is a bonus.
