For years, I scheduled media appearances and interviews in the morning.
Made sense, right? That's when TV shows air. That's when people are available. That's when everyone expects you to be "on."
What I didn't realize: I was burning my best mental hours on things that didn't require my best. Interviews I could have done half-asleep. Administrative stuff that didn't demand peak focus. Meetings that could have happened anytime.
Meanwhile, my actual deep work—studying competitors, visualizing races, the mental preparation that actually won medals—got pushed to the afternoon. When I was tired. When my brain felt like it was running through mud. When everything took twice as long and felt twice as hard.
I was fighting my own biology and didn't even know it.
Here's what I eventually figured out:
Everyone has a window. A specific time of day when your brain just works better. Not because you're trying harder. Not because you want it more. Just because that's how you're wired.
For some people it's early morning—they wake up sharp and ready without alarms. For others it's late afternoon or evening—they come alive when everyone else is winding down. Most people are somewhere in the middle.
During that window, everything clicks easier. Focus comes naturally. Problems feel solvable. The work flows instead of grinding.
Outside that window? You're swimming upstream. Everything takes longer. Simple things feel hard.
In corporate training sessions on peak performance, I have teams map their energy patterns across the day. The expensive mistake almost everyone makes: giving peak hours to whatever screams loudest—email, meetings, Slack—then saving important work for when they're depleted.
They're doing their hardest work when their brain is least equipped for it.
When I advise founders and executives, calendar architecture is one of the first things we examine. How are they protecting their peak hours? In most cases, they're not. They've surrendered their best cognitive time to other people's priorities.
This is a core principle of the Gold Medal Mindset I teach in workshops: protect your peak hours like they're sacred. The deep work happens first. Everything else fits around it.
I've implemented this principle in companies I advise and invest in. The results are consistent: when teams protect peak hours for their most important work, output quality goes up and stress goes down. It's not about working more hours—it's about working the right hours.
Finding your window is simple: If you had no alarms, no caffeine, no obligations for two weeks, when would you naturally wake up? When would you feel most sharp?
That's your window.
Guard it.
The hour you spend in your peak zone is worth four hours in your trough. That's not motivation. That's just biology.
Stop fighting it.
About Apolo Ohno: Apolo Ohno is a sought-after keynote speaker and leadership advisor known for translating elite performance principles into practical leadership behaviors. His work focuses on authentic leadership, executive presence, and the Gold Medal Mindset - helping executives and teams perform with clarity under pressure, communicate with conviction, and lead with credibility when the stakes are high. In his keynotes and workshops, Apolo helps leaders identify the unseen patterns, narratives, and habits that quietly limit performance, then replace them with a repeatable system for focus, resilience, and decisive action.