Most calendar tools are excellent at managing time. None of them are designed to manage capacity.
Beyond Time is built specifically for energy-aware planning — the practice of scheduling work according to biological capacity rather than clock availability. This walkthrough covers how to use it to implement an energy management practice from day one, moving through the audit, analysis, and Default Week design phases.
Before You Start: What You Need
The walkthrough assumes you are starting from scratch — no prior energy tracking, no established energy management practice.
If you have already run a manual Energy Audit using a spreadsheet or notes app, you can import your data and skip the first phase.
What you need: a Beyond Time account, five consecutive working days available for the audit phase, and a calendar you are willing to interrogate.
Phase 1: Running the Energy Audit in Beyond Time
The Energy Audit is the diagnostic foundation. Without it, any scheduling changes you make are based on assumption rather than data.
Step 1: Set up your dimensions.
When you create your account, Beyond Time prompts you to configure your tracking dimensions. The default setup follows Loehr and Schwartz’s framework: physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy. You can add a fourth dimension (spiritual/purpose) if you want to track values alignment alongside performance capacity.
For the first audit, use the default three dimensions. Adding a fourth is useful later but adds friction at the start.
Step 2: Configure your tracking blocks.
You can log at hourly intervals or at the end of each work block. For the first audit, hourly is better — it produces more granular data and makes patterns easier to identify. After the first week, most people shift to block-level logging, which takes less time and is sustainable long-term.
Step 3: Log for five days without changing your schedule.
This is the most important instruction: do not change anything about your schedule during the audit week. You are observing, not optimizing. The temptation to immediately move meetings or protect your morning is understandable, but it corrupts the diagnostic data.
Each entry takes approximately 60 to 90 seconds:
- Select your current or just-completed time block
- Rate physical energy (1–5), emotional energy (1–5), mental energy (1–5)
- Select the activity category (deep work, meeting, administrative, social, recovery)
- Add a brief context note if anything notable affected your state (poor sleep, difficult conversation, intense exercise)
By day three, the logging habit is established. By day five, you have enough data to begin the analysis.
Phase 2: Reading Your Energy Profile
At the end of day five — or after any five-day period — navigate to the Energy Profile view in Beyond Time.
The profile dashboard shows:
Your peak windows. The two or three daily time blocks where your scores are consistently highest across at least two dimensions. Beyond Time highlights these based on your log data and labels them with the typical alertness level (high/medium/low).
Your depletion patterns. The activity categories and time periods consistently associated with score drops. Common patterns: meetings that run more than 90 minutes, back-to-back social interactions without breaks, administrative task periods that stretch into low-energy afternoon slots.
Your recovery activities. Activities in your log that produced score increases after a low period. These are your most effective energy levers — the specific things that actually restore you, as opposed to the things you assume restore you.
Your demand-alignment score. Beyond Time calculates whether your high-demand tasks (deep work, complex meetings, strategic decisions) are scheduled in high-energy windows or low-energy windows. A low alignment score means your calendar structure is working against your biology.
Read the profile without immediately acting on it. The goal of this phase is understanding, not correction.
Phase 3: Building Your Default Week
The Default Week is a template schedule that matches task types to energy windows based on your profile. It is not a rigid structure — it will be overridden by real-world constraints — but it functions as the structural default that your calendar returns to each week.
Step 1: Tag your recurring commitments.
In Beyond Time, tag each recurring calendar event with its energy demand type: high-mental, high-emotional, low-demand, or recovery. This creates the raw material for the Default Week design.
Step 2: Generate the template.
Select “Design Default Week” in Beyond Time’s planning view. The tool maps your energy profile against your tagged commitments and generates a proposed template that:
- Places your highest-demand tasks in your peak windows
- Clusters meetings and collaborative work in your middle-energy windows
- Uses your trough window (typically early-to-mid afternoon) for administrative and low-demand work
- Includes at least two explicit recovery breaks per day
Review the proposed template critically. Beyond Time’s suggestions are a starting point. Override any placement that conflicts with hard constraints you cannot change.
Step 3: Identify the non-negotiable changes.
The Default Week will likely require some calendar negotiations — moving a recurring meeting, protecting a morning block, adding a standing break between two back-to-back sessions. Beyond Time’s “negotiation list” view identifies the three to five changes with the highest projected impact on your alignment score.
Implement these changes before anything else. Full Default Week implementation typically takes two to three weeks; the negotiation list tells you where to start.
Phase 4: Weekly Calibration
The weekly calibration is a 10-to-15-minute session that runs at the end of each week — Friday afternoon is the typical anchor.
In Beyond Time, the weekly review dashboard compares:
- Your Default Week template versus what actually happened
- Your planned energy allocation versus your logged energy scores
- Recovery activities planned versus recovery activities that occurred
The dashboard surfaces three or four specific observations: which deviations correlated with lower performance, which recovery activities were consistently skipped, and one suggested adjustment to the template based on the week’s patterns.
The calibration is not about judgment. It is about iteration. After eight weekly calibrations, your Default Week template is substantially better than what you built in week one.
The Three Most Common Adjustments Beyond Time Surfaces
Across users who run the full audit and Default Week design, three adjustments appear most frequently:
Morning peak misuse. Nearly everyone discovers they are using their highest-capacity window for email and Slack. The fix is almost always available and almost always resisted. Beyond Time’s demand-alignment score makes the cost of this pattern visible in a way that self-reported impressions do not.
Missing transition rituals. Most people’s calendars have no gap between consecutive meetings. Beyond Time flags these as “attention residue risk” — the research on task-switching (Leroy, 2009) shows that residual thinking from the previous task impairs performance on the next. Adding a 5-to-15-minute break produces measurable improvement in the second meeting’s engagement quality.
Recovery activities on paper only. The audit often reveals that activities logged as “recovery” — lunch at the desk, reading work Slack on the couch — are not producing energy restoration. Beyond Time distinguishes between activities that produced score increases (genuine recovery) and activities that merely paused depletion. The distinction changes what you actually schedule as recovery.
Getting Started
The fastest path to value: create your account, configure the three default energy dimensions, and start logging today. You do not need to redesign anything yet.
Five days of honest logging is the prerequisite for everything else — the profile, the Default Week, the weekly calibration. None of the advanced features produce useful output without the audit data underneath them.
Log today’s entries. Come back in five days.
Related: The Complete Guide to Energy Management Frameworks · The AI-Augmented Energy Management Framework · How to Manage Energy, Not Time · 5 AI Prompts for Energy Management
Tags: Beyond Time energy management, energy tracking tool, energy-aware planning, default week, energy audit
Frequently Asked Questions
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What is Beyond Time and how does it support energy management?
Beyond Time (beyondtime.ai) is a planning tool built specifically for capacity-aware scheduling. Unlike standard calendar applications, it lets you log energy states alongside calendar blocks, surfaces depletion patterns over time, and helps you identify when your schedule is consistently misaligned with your biological capacity. The weekly review dashboard makes the calibration step of an energy management practice significantly faster.
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How does the energy log work in Beyond Time?
You log your energy state against each work block — typically three dimensions (physical, emotional, mental) on a 1–5 scale. Beyond Time stores these alongside the associated activity type and context, then surfaces them in your weekly review as a pattern dashboard showing your peak windows, depletion triggers, and recovery effectiveness over time.
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Can I use Beyond Time to design a Default Week?
Yes. Once you have two or more weeks of energy log data, Beyond Time can help you generate a Default Week template that maps your task categories to appropriate energy windows. The template functions as a planning default that gets overridden by real-world constraints but resets each week as the structural starting point.
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How does Beyond Time integrate with AI for energy analysis?
Beyond Time's planning interface includes AI-assisted pattern analysis. You can ask it to identify your three most consistent peak windows, flag your highest-depletion activities, and suggest specific scheduling adjustments based on your log history — compressing what would otherwise be an hour of manual data review into a few minutes.
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Is Beyond Time appropriate for people just starting with energy management?
It is a good fit from day one. The onboarding flow is structured around the Energy Audit: it prompts you to log hourly entries for the first week without requiring any upfront configuration. You can start collecting data immediately and access the pattern analysis once you have five or more days of entries.