Maximizing Productivity by Understanding Your Personal Productivity Curve
Vonda and Lori are back from the Texas State Florists' forum in San Antonio, where they learned something about themselves the hard way: their two-hour presentation was scheduled for 4 to 6 p.m., and these two are decidedly morning people. It worked out — Lori disarmed the crowd by admitting up front that four o'clock is not their hour — but it got Vonda researching (a rare role reversal) why our energy peaks and craters when it does. The result is a genuinely useful conversation about personal productivity curves, with a couple of customer service stories that steal the opening act.
Two masterclasses in customer service (one involves fries)
Driving home on her birthday week, Lori finally treated herself to the McDonald's nobody in her household would accompany her to — and got a drive-thru employee so delightful she's emailing McDonald's about him. He puzzled out how to build her order cheaper than quoted ("I'm going to save you a little money — it's actually $6.92"), called her sweetheart, and told her to invest the eight cents. Two seconds of personality, and she's already planning her return trip. Vonda's version: needing rush merch for the AIFD booth, she emailed Paul at Quality Logo Products on the 19th with new artwork — and the physical order arrived on the 24th. Both stories land on the same point the hosts had just made on stage: going a little above and beyond is what makes customers want to come back and buy more.
Know your curve — and schedule around it
Citing a 2023 article on productivity, Vonda explains that everyone's internal clock, driven by circadian rhythms, sets their energy levels: some people peak between 8 a.m. and noon (that's Vonda and Lori, who deliberately stack meetings from 8:30 on and record the podcast early, because by 3:00 their "brain calories" are burned), while night owls surge in the evening. Ellie is the house example — firing off Slack messages at 8:30 p.m. while Lori, one eye on TikTok, can't process a word until 6:30 the next morning. Fighting your curve with ever more coffee eventually reads as overwork, overwhelm, and burnout; working with it means putting head-down focus work in your peak hours and pushing email — and, the article claims, meetings and calls — into your low-energy windows. The hosts push back a little on the meetings advice, but agree that within any meeting there are peaks and valleys, and teams naturally take turns being the high-level one in the room.
The right kind of stress is fuel
One surprise from the research: the right dose of work stress boosts energy and motivation rather than draining it. Deadlines are the proof — think of filming Prep School courses at 9:30 at night with limited sunlight the next day, or loading the van before a big event, or the adrenaline of Valentine's, Mother's Day, and wedding season stacked back to back. Somehow you rally, and speed goes up as the pressure kicks in. Lori adds an important caveat: this is challenge stress, project stress — not trauma or anxiety-inducing stress, which paralyzes rather than energizes. And when your own adrenaline dips, a good team carries you: one person's low is covered by the next person's surge, even if your whole team is just you and one right-hand person.
Stop answering every ding
The most actionable piece is the communication curve. Lori confesses to the classic pattern: an email from a member arrives, she stops mid-task, responds, returns, gets interrupted again — and that constant refocusing is where mistakes creep into projects. The fix is batching: check email at set intervals instead of instantly, still timely but on your schedule. Ellie's version is timer-based focus chunks — 30 minutes with all notifications off, then a 10-minute window for email and Slack, then back in. Vonda tested it the very day of recording while working on a sympathy refresh project, letting Slack ding unanswered for 15-minute stretches — and nearly finished a project that interruptions would have wrecked. Both hosts also tuned their notifications to their own habits: Lori silences phone notifications unless she's away from her desk; Vonda does the reverse. The rule is simply: make the setup serve your focus, not your reflexes.
Key takeaways
- Identify your peak hours and guard them for head-down work; tell your staff when you need focus time.
- Ask every employee whether they're a morning or evening person — and staff late-night event takedowns with your night owls.
- Batch email and Slack into scheduled windows; instant responses cost you refocusing time and cause mistakes.
- Use deadline-style challenge stress as fuel — and let teammates' energy carry the room when yours dips.
- Small above-and-beyond service moments — a joke at the drive-thru, a five-day turnaround — are what bring customers back.