Mental Energy

You already know the feeling. At ten in the morning a hard problem opens up in front of you and you can hold all of it in your head at once. At three in the afternoon the same problem is a wall. Nothing about the problem changed. What changed was the clarity you brought to it.

MakeTimeFlow now lets you record that clarity as you go, draws the shape of your day from it, and keeps the record so you can learn your own rhythm rather than guess at it.

Where to find it

On the Focus page, just above the Flow Coach, there is a one-line Energy bar. Hover over it (or tap it) and the full strip opens: today’s curve, and a slider sitting on the “now” line. Drag the slider to where you are. That’s a reading.

What you’re measuring

Mental energy is how clear your thinking is right now. Not how motivated you feel, not how rested your body is, not whether you want to do the task in front of you. Just clarity.

The scale runs from 0 to 100, and five words name its bands:

Reading	Band	What it feels like
0–19	Brain-dead	You can answer email. You should not decide anything.
20–39	Foggy	Routine work is fine. Anything new feels heavier than it is.
40–59	Steady	An ordinary working hour. Nothing special either way.
60–79	Sharp	Good thinking. You can hold a problem and turn it over.
80–100	Peak	The rare hour when the hard thing is easy. Protect it.

Every one of those words is about clarity, on purpose. “I don’t have the energy for this” often means I can’t face it, and none of these five words will accept that meaning. That is what keeps the measure honest. You cannot truthfully answer Sharp because you went to the gym, and you cannot answer Foggy because the task is boring.

Reading the strip

The curve is your day. Each dot is something you told it: a slider reading, the question at the end of a focus session, the morning question in Begin Well.

Between your readings, the line is an estimate, and it is shaped by what you were actually doing. A focus session pulls it down. A scheduled block pulls it down more gently. The half hour after either one recovers some of it. Open time slopes off slowly. Then the line lands on your next reading, whatever you said.

The shaded band under the line is how much of that is guesswork. It is zero at every dot, because a dot is something you said, and it widens between them. A stretch you reported on every hour has a thin band. Seven hours with nothing recorded has a fat one, and if the model was badly wrong about where you’d end up, the band says so rather than pretending. The line between two dots is never a fact. The band is what keeps it from looking like one.

Ahead of your latest reading, the line runs on for ninety minutes and stops. That is roughly one good bout of work and its break, the span over which a reading is still worth trusting. Past three hours the strip goes grey. Nothing nags you. The fading is the whole reminder.

The rhythm, not the reading

One reading tells you very little. The value is in the pattern across days.

Data → Energy shows your readings by hour of the day and by day of the week, and the more you record the clearer your shape becomes. Most people who do this for two weeks find something they half-knew and had never acted on: a peak they were spending on email, a trough they were forcing hard work through, an afternoon that recovers if lunch has a walk in it and does not if it doesn’t.

Readings taken at the end of a focus session carry the session with them, so “does two hours on the product leave me Sharp or Foggy?” and “what does a morning of meetings actually cost?” are questions the data can now answer.

Three readings a day is plenty

This is easy to overdo. You do not need to log every hour. The morning question in Begin Well, the question after each focus session, and a slider move when you notice a real change will draw the shape of your day. Missing readings widen the band; they do not break anything.

Run an experiment on it

The strip becomes genuinely useful when you put a question to it. That is what Personal Experiments are for: one to two weeks, one change, one thing you’re watching.

Some that people run:

• Where does my peak actually fall? Record for two weeks without changing anything. Then look at Data → Energy by hour.
• Does a walk at lunch buy back the afternoon? One week without, one week with. Compare the 2–4pm stretch.
• What does a 90-minute focus session cost me, compared with 50? The after-session question answers this over a fortnight.
• Do meetings before noon cost more than meetings after? Put the same meetings in different halves of the day across two weeks.

For a longer question, a four-week Smart Bet works the same way: decide what you’d expect to see, run it, and let the readings settle it.

The point is not to optimise every hour. It is to stop guessing about the one or two things that decide whether a day goes well, and to put your best hours where they matter.

Correcting a reading

• Nudged the slider and want it somewhere else? Move it again. Within a few minutes of a reading, a second move edits that reading rather than adding another dot.
• Forgot to record the morning? Tap the hour on the graph, then move the slider. The reading is dated to that hour and marked as recalled, which is honest: remembering how you felt is not the same as noticing it at the time.
• Said Foggy after a session and meant Sharp? Tap the other chip. It updates the same reading.

Where readings come from

Moment	What asks
Starting the day	one question in [[Rituals
Ending a focus session	the three chips: Foggy / Steady / Sharp
Any time	the slider on the Focus strip
Looking back	tap an hour, then the slider
Writing a journal entry	the same three chips

Your coach sees your latest reading and how fresh it is. It will say “you were at 62 at 14:30” rather than “you’re at 62” once a reading is going stale, and it treats the line between readings as a guess it may ask you about, never as something you told it.

Related

• Focus Mode — the workspace the strip lives in
• Rituals — Begin Well, where the day’s first reading happens
• Getting Started with Goals — Personal Experiments and Smart Bets, the way to put a question to your readings
• Know Yourself — Values, Strengths, Relationships, and now your rhythm