Business Insider’s Eric Barker has a nice profile of Dan Ariely’s recent work on productivity and time management. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his books, how did you survive this long? You really need to read Predictably Irrational at the very least. “Most recently,” though, Ariely has taken a break from writing bestsellers and

turned his attention to the irrationality of how we use our time and has helped create a new smart-calendar app, Timeful.

What’s great is the data from Timeful is helping us learn things about what works and what doesn’t as it relates to productivity.

So what’s his advice?

• The world is working against you. We all “are spending more of our time in environments that have their own agendas.” This means you have to take steps to recover your time and attention.
• Control your environment or it will control you. “If you banish distractions and control your calendar you can make sure your environment is ripe for productivity.”
• Write everything down.
• When you do what you do is key. “You have a window of 2 to 2.5 hours of peak productivity per day, starting a couple hours after waking…. Those are the hours when you should be working on your most cognitively demanding tasks. The big projects. The stuff that really moves the needle.”
• [Avoid] The four horsemen of the productivity apocalypse: meetings, email, multitasking, and structured procrastination.
• No email breaks. That’s not real rest. Turn on your phone’s whitelist, or better yet leave it at your desk, and go take a walk.

The work on time of day is interesting, and to me not too surprising: I found when I was writing The Distraction Addiction that I did my best writing super-early in the morning (in an environment totally free of external and internal distractions). That’s still the case with this book, and there are plenty of writers, composers, etc. who report the same experience.