Uncover your chronotype and use it to turbo-charge productivity.

what is on your mind. What are the questions that you have around the world of work, working from home, productivity, being happier at work, anything you like. So if you've got questions on your mind, please email them through to me at Amantha at inventium dot com dot au, and I will be picking out ones that I think lots of other listeners can benefit from having answers. So that

is what today's episode is about. So today's listener question is all about chronotypes, which is if you haven't heard of the term chronotype before, it's basically refers to our twenty four hour cycle of when our energy is at its peak and when it's at its trough. When you're asleep,

but also sometimes during certain times of the day. So the question is what's a good way to test and understand where you fit on the chronotype spectrum, and when understood, how do you best balance your natural rhythms against the demands of customers, colleagues, and family. So to give everyone that's not familiar with the idea of chronotypes just a sense of a bit more of a sense of what chronotypes are, there are essentially three broad categories that we

can fall into. So there are a larks. This is about sixteen to seventeen percent of the population, so people that you know naturally rush out of bed at five or five point thirty in the morning without an alarm, and they do their best deep work in the morning, first thing in the morning. Then we've got owls at the other end of the spectrum. Owls account for about twenty percent of the population, and these are people that do their best work and they're most energized at night,

when ironically most workplaces are closed. And then we also have middle birds. And middlebirds fall somewhere in between the spectrum, but they generally follow the pattern of luck, albeit delayed by a couple of hours. So in order to test what kind of bird or chronotype you are. The most easily available test that is also free and silentifically validated is the Morningness Eveningness Questionnaire, and I will link to

that in the show notes. It's very simple, it will only take you a few minutes, and Inventium we can actually calculate those results automatically for you, So I'll link to that in the show notes. So what to do when you understand your chronotype? Well, when it comes to work, this is a really great thing for everybody that you work with to do and to be really clear on what are your coworkers. Are they running on the same chronotype as you or are they running on different chronotypes.

So it's a really good thing for your team to all take so that you can understand this as a team and start to sync up when you do sort of deeper, more intense thinking and collaboration work and when you do more shallow work, work that is less cognitively demanding. So how we do things at Inventium. We all took the Morning This Evening a survey gosh two or three years ago now, so we all know each other's chronotypes. Most of us are either laks or middlebirds, although our CEO,

Mish is an owl. So what this means as a team when we're trying to sink up schedules, we know that when we need to collaborate as a team or as a sub team within the Greater Inventium team, we set those meetings for the morning, typically between nine and twelve, when most of us are at our best in terms of brain power. Four things that are more update meetings

or work in progress or check ins. They're generally designated between the hours of twelve and two, when most of us are having a dip in energy and it's a really good time for less cognitively demanding meetings. And then we have a rebound in a late afternoon. So if however, we were a team of mostly ours, would probably reverse

that kind of pattern. Now, when it comes to your significant others, perhaps your family, this is certainly a useful thing to get your partner to do and see how you're different or similar and try to align your schedules according to that. But also recognize that kids tend to run on and their own specific chronotypes. So generally when we start life as a newborn, we're very lakish we get up very early in the morning, as I'm sure

most parents of younger people will attest to. Then when we get into our teenage years, we become more our like and we come to life at night, which when it comes to school hours, is not particularly good. And I think that there are a lot of psychologists and chronotype researchers that have commented that the way school is scheduled for teenagers is certainly not ideal in terms of getting the best out of them. But that is a whole other conversation. So recognize that your kids will be

different depending on their ages. And then the more we progress towards are older years, we tend to become more lakish, so just keep that in mind. So I hope that's given you some useful things to think about when it comes to chronotypes. As I said, if you don't know what your chronotype is, check out the show notes. Just click on the episodisode wherever you've listened to this and there will be a link to a survey to help

you figure that out. And if you want more help, this is something that we help a lot of our clients with at Inventium, making the most of their chronotype when it comes to their working life for themselves and with their team. So just get in touch and my contact details are always in the show notes and I'm at Amantha at inventium dot com dot au. So that

is it for today's show. If you have a core question that you would like me to answer, please send that through to Amantha at inventium dot com door au. And if you know someone that could benefit from thinking more about chronotypes, why not share this episode with them. So that is it for today's show and I will see you next time