Imagine a skill so great that Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics and the discoverer of the concept of gravity, attributed his success to it. In his own words, he stated, “If I have made any improvements in the sciences, it is owing more to patient attention than to anything else.”

Superior genius as well as just about all high-quality work requires that you devote the entirety of your attention to a given task. However, not all attention is made equal.

During each day, you have periods during which your mind is at its peak performance and other times when your mind performs at a much lower level. Graham Allcott in How to be a Productivity Ninja describes the concept of attention management and categorizes our daily attention levels into three categories: (1) proactive attention: our highest level of attention during which we are best suited to take our most important decisions and tackle complex tasks; (2) active attention: our medium level of attention during which we are useful at getting jobs done which don’t require strategic thinking; and (3) inactive attention: our lowest level of attention where the value of our output is limited, but we can do menial tasks well.

Allcott adds that we only normally have 2-3 hours of proactive attention each day, same for active attention, with the remainder being inactive attention.

With these limited hours, we must carefully guard them to ensure that our hours of proactive attention are devoted to our most mentally-demanding tasks and that we don’t corrupt with with distraction. Notice how I employed the phrase “most mentally-demanding” tasks instead of “most important tasks”. There is an important distinction between what is most urgent or important to do during a given day and the tasks which require the greatest amount of brainpower.

For most people, their periods of proactive, active and inactive attention follow a daily recurring schedule. “Morning people” generally have their hours of proactive attention during the morning and “Night owls” generally have them late at night. Inactive attention has a habit of following meals and periods of several hours of proactive or active attention. People often also have a mid-afternoon period of proactive attention after they pass the after lunch (digestion) period of inactive attention.

Accordingly, your task is to determine your daily attention schedule, meaning what are your normal hours when you are at your proactive, active and inactive attention levels.

Your next task is to try to match as much as possible your highest and most attention-demanding tasks with your periods of proactive attention. Your medium attention demanding tasks should be allocated towards your periods of active attention. And, finally, your more menial tasks should be allocated to your periods of inactive attention.

Putting this into practice means that you want to try to free up your hours of proactive attention to work on your real problem-solving tasks such as developing a marketing plan or devising new products as opposed to more menial tasks such as checking your email or filing, which should be completed during your inactive attention periods. Naturally, you also want to shield yourself from distraction, so try to remove your notifications and separate yourself from people who will want to distract you.

A good trick is to divide the tasks in your to-do list by the level of attention required (proactive, active or inactive). This will facilitate matching your tasks with your current attention level.

In many ways, your success and the calibre of your work product depends on correctly solving this matching problem as a mismatch between your actual attention level and the attention level required by each of your tasks will be a barrier to performing at your highest level.

As you get more and more in the habit of allocating your tasks based on your attention schedule, you will see your productivity skyrocket. This will also mean that you should be able to get much more work done in less hours.

In that regard, if you are working a day job as well as working on your side-hustle business, try to allocate some of your precious proactive attention hours to your business to ensure that it also gets to benefit from your genius as well. There is no reason why your employer should have a monopoly on your most productive hours, you have an inherent right to them as well. This will also significantly increases your business’ chances of success.

Finally, be mindful that sleep is essential to proactive attention. This is one of the reasons why your attention wanders more when you are tired as compared to when you are well rested. By sleeping more, you are trading hours of inactive attention for proactive attention hours when you are awake – a worthwhile trade.

Take Newton’s words to heart and optimize the use of your attention to perform at your best. Good luck!