What does it mean to plan by energy instead of by time?

Clock planning assigns tasks to hours and assumes you'll show up to each hour with the same capacity. Energy planning assigns tasks to states. You sort tasks by what they cost (a low-effort errand, a normal-load email, a deep-focus block) and then, at the moment of doing, you check what you actually have and pick from the matching shelf. The schedule bends around the brain you brought today.

Is ADHD really a rhythm problem and a sleep problem?

To a striking degree, yes. A 2025 review found insomnia and sleep disturbance in up to 80% of adults with ADHD, a delayed sleep/wake cycle in roughly 73 to 78% of children and adults, and melatonin onset arriving about 90 minutes later in ADHD adults than in neurotypical adults. Around three-quarters of adults with childhood-onset ADHD show objective evidence of phase-delayed circadian rhythms.

What is the synchrony effect?

The synchrony effect is the finding that people perform demanding cognitive work better at the time of day that matches their chronotype. In one study, morning types kept stable accuracy through a morning session and deteriorated steadily in the evening, while evening types showed the reverse. The effect appeared on tasks requiring controlled attention, which is exactly the kind of work ADHD brains already pay extra for.

How do Ikoi's energy levels work?

Ikoi asks one question: how is your battery? Zombie, okay, or hyperfocus. Each task carries an energy cost, and the answer filters your day to tasks that match the state you're in. Scheduling works on parts of day (morning, afternoon, evening, night) instead of demanding exact clock times, so a plan survives waking up as a different version of yourself.

Doesn't energy planning just mean doing easy things forever?

The opposite, in practice. Hard tasks need your best hours, and a clock schedule routinely spends those hours on email because 9am looked administrative when you planned the week. Energy planning protects the good hours for the expensive work and gives the depleted hours a job they can actually finish, instead of a failure to accumulate.

The 9am version of you keeps scheduling work for the 3pm version

Tuesday, 9:30am. I had coffee, a calendar, and the unearned confidence of a man who had slept almost seven hours. I blocked the day out beautifully: deep work until noon, admin after lunch, a gym slot, then “write blog post, 90 min.”

By 2pm I was rereading the same paragraph of an email with the comprehension of a houseplant. The 90-minute writing block arrived at 4pm and found nobody home. The plan was good. The person it was written for never showed up.

I used to treat this as a discipline failure. Then I noticed the pattern: the plan always assumed a person with flat, constant capacity, and the day always delivered a person with peaks and craters. The calendar was budgeting a currency I don’t hold.

Every calendar makes the same silent assumption

A time grid treats hours as interchangeable containers. Tuesday 9am and Tuesday 4pm are the same size on screen, so the planner inside you treats them as the same size in life. Fill the container, do the contents.

For neurotypical brains this is already a rough approximation. For ADHD brains it’s closer to fiction, because the underlying rhythm is measurably different. A 2025 review of circadian research in ADHD puts numbers on it: insomnia and sleep disturbance in up to 80% of adults with ADHD, a delayed sleep/wake cycle in roughly 73 to 78% of children and adults, and dim-light melatonin onset (the body’s biological dusk signal) arriving about 90 minutes later in ADHD adults than in neurotypical ones. About three-quarters of adults with childhood-onset ADHD show objective, lab-measurable phase delay.

Ninety minutes is a meaningful shift. It means the standard workday is graded against a clock your body disputes. Your 9am is somebody else’s 7:30am. The “morning person” schedule that productivity culture treats as a virtue is, for most of this population, a daily argument with melatonin.

Performance follows the rhythm, whatever the clock says

The delay would matter less if performance were flat across the day. It isn’t. Chronobiology has a name for what happens when you do hard thinking at the hour your body prefers: the synchrony effect. In one study of sustained attention, morning types held stable accuracy across a morning session and showed a steady decline through an evening session. Evening types showed the mirror image. The effect showed up specifically on conditions requiring controlled, effortful processing, and disappeared on automatic ones.

Read that again from inside an ADHD skull. Controlled, effortful processing is the expensive kind, the kind executive dysfunction taxes hardest. The research says that exact kind of work is the most sensitive to scheduling it at the wrong biological hour. Easy tasks survive a bad time slot. The proposal, the tax return, the difficult email: those are the ones that quietly need your peak.

There’s a sharper twist in the ADHD-specific data. A study that ran the TOVA attention test on young adults with ADHD at different times of day found that self-identified night owls reported more inattention symptoms on questionnaires, yet made significantly fewer omission errors on the actual test. The people who felt most broken performed measurably well once the measurement met them where they were. Some of what gets experienced as symptom severity is plausibly schedule mismatch wearing a symptom costume.

Spoons, batteries, and other attempts to name the obvious

The chronic-illness community solved the vocabulary problem decades ago. Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory, adopted enthusiastically by the ADHD community, models the day as a fixed handful of energy units where every task has a price. ADHD adds its own line items: routine tasks cost more than they look, masking burns energy invisibly, and the day’s starting balance varies in ways you don’t get to vote on.

Whatever metaphor you prefer (spoons, battery, mana), the operational insight is the same. The binding constraint on your day is rarely hours. It’s units of usable attention, and they’re unevenly distributed, badly forecastable, and phase-shifted later than the world expects.

So here’s the planning question that actually matters at 2pm. A calendar asks: what time is it? The better question: what do I have right now?

What planning by energy looks like

The mechanics are small and almost insultingly simple.

Price your tasks when you capture them. Low, medium, high. “Cancel the free trial” is a low. “Draft the proposal” is a high. You know the price at a glance; the only trick is writing it down while you still remember.
At the moment of doing, check your state first. Honestly. The check takes two seconds and replaces an hour of staring at a list that’s wrong for the person reading it.
Pick from the matching shelf. Depleted gets the lows: the two-minute wins, the door openers. Functional gets the normal load. The rare locked-in state gets the expensive work, immediately, because that state has a half-life.
Schedule to parts of day, never to minutes. “Afternoon” is a promise an ADHD brain can keep. “2:30pm” is a tripwire. I’ve written before about how rigid time blocking collapses on the first domino; coarse buckets are the version that survives contact with an actual Tuesday.

Notice what this fixes about the cratered 2pm. Under clock planning, a crater is a failure: the block was scheduled, the block was missed, the day is now behind. Under energy planning, a crater is just a state, and there’s a shelf for it. You do a low, it counts, and the expensive task waits for an hour that can afford it instead of getting smeared across four hours that couldn’t.

The day stops being a test you can fail by 10am.

Where Ikoi fits

I built this directly into Ikoi because I needed it more than I needed any other feature. The app asks how your battery is (zombie, okay, hyperfocus), every task carries an energy cost, and the answer filters your day down to tasks that match. Scheduling runs on morning, afternoon, evening, and night rather than exact clock times. Time blindness makes the clock a weak signal anyway; part-of-day buckets are the resolution at which an ADHD plan stays true.

None of this manufactures energy. Zombie hours stay zombie hours. The difference is that the plan finally accounts for them, the way a sane budget accounts for rent: as a known cost, written down in advance, surprising no one.

The 9am version of you means well. He’s just writing checks for an account he doesn’t manage. Give him a price list instead of a clock, and the 3pm version might finally cash one.