Ines Almeida

Her claim is that most people's fixed-schedule deep work blocks (e.g., always 9-11 a.m.) ignore that alertness is a wave, not a constant, so a chunk of every scheduled block is often spent fighting a natural trough. Instead of treating low-energy periods as failures of discipline, she treats them as expected and schedules something appropriately shallow for them — email, filing, tidying notes — so no time slot is wasted on a task mismatched to the energy available.

Because the exact timing of peaks varies by person, she has people track subjective alertness on a simple scale every hour for one to two weeks before assigning any schedule, rather than adopting a generic "best hours" template from someone else. The tracking itself is the intervention — most people who do it discover their real peaks don't match when they assumed they were sharpest.

A common misreading of her method is to treat troughs as rest time. She's explicit that troughs are for a different category of work, not no work — the point is matching task difficulty to available energy, not working less overall. Genuine rest (short walks, real breaks) is scheduled separately from trough-time shallow work.

She warns against rescheduling around every single dip, which turns the calendar into chaos. The wave should be identified once, then locked into a repeating weekly template — adjusted only every few months, not daily — so the system provides structure rather than becoming its own source of decision fatigue.