Spent at 2:30pm? A crowdsourced list of low-energy work tasks you could do to match your energy

A woman recently shared with me that she’s spent by 2:30pm each workday and was curious what low-energy tasks are good fits for the remainder of her workday. These are the types of questions that are so fun to dig into and personalize with clients (matching tasks to energy is a big part of the Bright Method), and I love hearing from others about them, too.

So, we crowdsourced what others do during similar low-energy windows. And here are the responses!

We’re going to touch on four important intro points first and then turn to the tasks themselves!

Remember: There are no right or wrong answers here – feel free to pick a few options, experiment, and adjust (and know this article is here to help you re-calibrate if/when you want to!).

Important Intro Points

Important Intro Point 1: Is There a Deeper Reason for the Tiredness?

One woman wrote:

“What is the age of this woman? What is she eating for bfast and lunch and is she getting out of the office into the sunshine? If the second question here seems ok, then finding her age is crucial. If she is peri-menopausal or menopausal I have found that seeing a hormone or endocrine doctor has been a game changer. The right balance of hormones can help 10000%. Exhaustion at 2:30pm is a progesterone/estriol imbalance that affects sleep and then recovery. That is my two cents from someone that had to take a nap at 230 for a year before I figured it out!!!”

– A woman in higher education

Worth considering!

Important Intro Point 2: Proactive Planning – Consider Scheduling Meetings For Those Times

In case you want to think about planning your days proactively knowing that the slump is coming, let’s talk about that. Part of the Bright Method is considering when, generally, your energy is higher and lower – and then match-making tasks to those windows. It won’t be perfect (because we’re not robots), but it helps.

For some, they know low energy happens more often in the afternoon and have decided meetings are actually a good match for that energy (thereby hopefully saving more high-energy windows for focused work):

• Manufacturing (General Manager): “mtgs with mentees: they have energy and it can be easy to talk with them since it leans more casual”
• “I also try to schedule catch ups with people who I enjoy as an energy booster… I keep a list of colleagues I don’t work with regularly but either enjoy or find value in the connection and try to schedule quarterly for coffee or in person catch up. This gives me something to look forward in the lull of the mid afternoon slump.”
• Higher education (professor): “schedule meetings for the afternoons when I don’t have a lot of brainpower, and the social interaction helps wake me up”
• Academia: “I also often schedule meetings or class during this time. I often find that I can muster up the energy for a meeting but it doesn’t require the same deep thinking that other tasks might take (which I save for the morning).”
• Law (lawyer): “‘easy’ meetings that I can listen to passively”

Important Intro Point 3: Own That You’re Done

A couple of women made these excellent points:

• “I’d push back on the idea that we have to find something (anything!) to do to make to 5p. Maybe we’d drive more value if we took a break first, and then picked one concrete task/project to close the loop on to end the day feeling like we moved the ball forward.”
• “I find that even by being mostly done at 2pm I have reduced guilt by knowing I get my job done well, achieve my goals and stay responsive when needed in the remaining hours.”

Agreed! Hours are somewhat arbitrary, and I suspect most of us get 4 hours tops of great work done each day, so these are excellent points!

Important Intro Point 4: Keep a Menu Ready for When the Energy Slumps

One woman, a professor, shared this great idea: “I generally have a menu of items that are like this ready for these chunks of times.”

So, as you read through the below, consider compiling a short menu of options for Future Tired You.

As you do, keep this general philosophy in mind from one sharer who works in healthcare administration: “Overall, [I use low-energy windows to] just clear[] friction for the times I am ‘on’.” I love this approach and think about it in the same way: what do I have the energy for that I could get done to save Future More Energized Me from having to spend energy on so she can use that energy for more important, high-impact things.

Alright, let’s turn to the tasks themselves!

Low-Energy Task Ideas

Digital tidying (files, desktop, drives)

Low stakes, oddly satisfying, and a favorite landing spot for a tired brain – here’s what women shared about this:

• “filing emails/docs from download on your computer, cleaning your computer desktop”
• Education (school district): “I like to do digital organizing, tidying up my desktop which slowly gets cluttered 🙂 This task can also creep into cleaning/organizing folders as I’m putting things away. I also use Google Drive in my role and that can use some cleaning and organizing every few months.”
• Real estate (office manager): “moving files from my downloads folder to their ‘homes’ aka OneDrive folders (a task I often skip when I am in a hurry!)”
• Higher education (fundraising): “Organizing my desktop: I often download files and let them linger on my desktop so try to clear that out at least once a week.”
• Agriculture: “Organize my computer files, like move the item I quickly stored on desktop to a proper subject matter folder”
• Higher education (student services): “Clean out old folders on our shared filing system. Rename things, etc.”
• Business administration (government agency): “Archiving emails and digital files”
• Environmental consulting: “making sure my project folders and sites are all updated and I’ve pdfd and saved recent important emails”
• “desktop cleanup”; “pick one ‘file folder’ on my laptop to clean up”

Email triage and low-lift replies

A classic: clear email. As some women shared:

• Legal services attorney: “emails that require just a quick confirmation, follow up messages to clients with reminders”
• Healthcare administration: “email newsletter triage/inbox cleanup”
• Technology: “processing my email inbox – I save the harder emails for later, but getting rid of the noise is a low-energy task for me”
• Agriculture: “Pick an email folder to review for possible deletion and clean up”
• Real estate (office manager): “cleaning up my email inbox (deleting emails that are obsolete and saving ones we may need for an audit to OneDrive)”
• Corporate accounting: “email processing, replying to requests received through our internal ticketing system”
• Corporate (finance/investing): “Process emails – low effort that just require filing or quick replies”
• Higher education (professor): “responding to some emails that have come in throughout the day so my inbox is less cluttered when I work on it again in the evening or the next morning”
• “Clear inbox – respond to easy emails and task (put on to-do list) emails that need more mental energy to respond to.”
• Finance: “clear up inbox”
• Higher education (leads a team of 25): “Left to my own devices, I’ll just reply to emails and work on minor tasks during this low energy time.”
• Beverage and hospitality marketing: “Read/Remove all Junk/Newsletters you are going to read someday from Inbox”
• Environmental consulting: “responding to emails that don’t require much besides me giving quick direction or passing the work to someone else without much explanation”
• Nonprofit service association: “I use these kinds of times for low-decision tasks–I’ll go into the inbox our frontline team uses to manager incoming inquiries and help with low hanging fruit (password resets, where is this resource, send the link for such and such).  for such and such)”

Financial and rote admin

Expenses, invoices, timesheets, the rote stuff that doesn’t need your sharpest mind:

• “Submitting expenses”
• “Work on my financial model (I find numbers less draining than interacting with people)”
• Legal services attorney: “catching up on time keeping”
• Agriculture: “Do an expense report”
• Higher education (fundraising): “Submitting receipts and tolls/mileage for my expense report”; “Booking hotels/trains/flights/rental cars for upcoming work travel”
• Finance: “expense report (add items from the week)”
• Beverage and hospitality marketing: “Credit Card/Expense Reports”
• Business administration (government agency): “Reviewing my budget”
• “Process expenses (submit mileage, expenses, etc)”
• Corporate comms (agency side): “Timesheets (bane of my life)”; “agency admin rather than client work – eg reviewing capacity planners and reconciling budgets”
• “Any rote tasks: downloading and saving files, generating and sending invoices, bookkeeping, making payments”
• Environmental consulting: “reviewing/approving invoices”

Calendar and planning

Setting up Future You well: prepping, looking ahead, getting the week into shape:

• “Make a list of important upcoming meetings that require prep and block time on your calendar for the prep ahead of the meeting.”
• “Prepping for Clean Slate, reviewing my schedule, compiling various to do’s, etc.”
• Legal services attorney: “revisiting my weekly plan if changes are needed”
• Agriculture: “Make sure my calendar is updated for next month or two”
• Manufacturing (General Manager): “Planning and organizing: prepping for a project, set up for next day or week, setting mtgs”
• Project management in healthcare: “Calendar review- book prep time for upcoming meetings, look for conflicts with childcare, etc”
• Higher education (fundraising): “Look ahead in the calendar to identify any potential conflicts or meetings that need to be moved”; “working on my calendar, scheduling personal tasks and to-dos, writing out my to do list for tomorrow, filling in my planner, online grocery shopping, and sending reminders to my team!”
• Higher education (professor): “start my weekly planning process for next week so it’s less of a big thing when I go to do it a next day”
• “Spent time with my calendar – note things that should be there. Plan for the remaining days. Get an idea of what I need to get done the rest of the week.”; “Review my goals – refine/modify my weekly and monthly dashboard”
• Business administration (government agency): “Meeting prep, like printing off any documents, reserving a car to drive, etc.”; “Meeting follow-ups, like sending out my slide deck or scheduling the next meeting”; “Updating my running notes for projects and employee performance”

Household-related tasks

• “Do a few household-related tasks (emails related to the kids, scheduling things, purchasing things online)”
• Corporate (finance/investing): “Do some personal low effort processing – could be emails or grocery order”
• “Meal plan!”
• Corporate accounting: “I bring my computer into the kitchen and will do some dinner prep to break up those last hours (washing/chopping/etc).”
• “If I’m watching a webinar or CE program, I don’t feel badly also doing some things around the house like laundry, clean-up, and getting dinner prepped.”

Learning and professional development

Webinars, reading, trainings – the things you can take in without having to generate anything & can tidy, etc. at the same time if you want to:

• “Check the box on some mandatory training”
• Law: “I have the Speechify app that reads things aloud. I have it read me new case law, cases I needed to read for work, legal briefs, whatever… it lets me review the material in a way that allows me to rest my eyes and think about it with a different part of my brain.”
  • This is Kelly – I bolded this because… amazing!
• Legal services attorney: “catching up on news/policy changes/new case law that affects my practice area (sometimes this is reading; sometimes it’s watching a webinar etc)”
• Law (lawyer): “continuing education videos, time to read articles I’ve flagged for professional purposes (e.g. a weekly subscription about industry legal updates)”
• Technology: “doing required training – we have quarterly requirements so this comes up a lot and is often repetitive”; “keeping up on industry news – this often includes things like reviewing newsletters, reading about a specific topic that keeps coming up, etc.”
• Healthcare administration: “Required trainings, optional recorded webinars and trainings for advancement… reading a professional book… reading work newsletters and watching associated videos”
• Finance: “continuing education”
• Project management in healthcare: “Continuing Education- I have my PMP and need lots of education hours, so this is when I’ll do webinars or look for CE options”; “this is when I’ll read market digest sent internally or review articles from external think tanks… since I don’t need to live and breathe the information and just need a casual grasp of it, this task works well for those times.”
• Higher education (professor): “watching continuing webinars… doing a literature search”
• Manufacturing (General Manager): “Any one-way listening: latest CEO talk I missed, industry news or webcasts, etc. also love doing it while on my walking pad.”
• Corporate (finance/investing): “If I have something longer-form to read (industry report, legal brief that’s just an FYI for me), take that to another location in the office to read”
• Higher education (student services): “Skim industry publications or check out competitor social media accounts, see what others are up to.”
• Beverage and hospitality marketing: “Listen to a professional development book/podcast and go on a walk”
• Environmental consulting: “Required training”
• “Do reading/learning (catch up on industry articles or start reading about a new topic)”

Note: If you’re a podcast person, in addition to that amazing Speechify app up there, you could give a long article to NotebookLM and have it generate a “podcast” of people speaking about it to learn the information that way if you’d like!

Physical space (desk, paper, office upkeep)

Sometimes, physical puttering is weirdly enjoyable when your brain is spent. The puttering tasks – and many shared they couple this sometimes with CLE/CME/continuing learning webinars, etc.

• Legal services attorney: “cleaning my office”; “filing any papers/mail that has built up”
• Agriculture: “Clean my office space- shred documents that have piled up”
• Higher education (fundraising): “Cleaning my desk/office”
• Beverage and hospitality marketing: “Clean off desk, including dusting”
• Finance: “go through pile of files in desk that I can probably shred”
• Business administration (government agency): “Cleaning off my desk”
• Corporate (finance/investing): “Unload our office dishwasher”
• “Physical space clean up”
• Real estate (office manager): “refilling the printers with paper, stocking the bathrooms with paper products, checking for updates on my computer”
• “Catch up on any handwritten notes” – this one is a little different but merges with physical space.

Connection and relationship tasks

If relationships fuel you:

• Manufacturing (General Manager): “Walking around to talk to people: as a leader I need to do this but don’t like taking away from peak times in my day.”
• “Tackle your list of thank you notes / emails to referral sources and/or employees. Meaningful and can GIVE energy.”
  • Reminder: There’s no right or wrong here. For me, thank you notes are a high energy task, but for others, they’re clearly not. Listen to yourself!
• Agriculture: “Check in with a colleague… inquire about what they are working on, what is exciting them, brainstorm solving a problem that never seems to go away, personal catch up”
• Higher education (fundraising): “Casual Teams chats with my remote colleagues (while I’m hybrid, I manage employees who work remotely all over the country so this helps me stay connected with them)”
• Healthcare administration: “relationship management – sending short thank yous, recognition, holding check ins”
• Corporate (finance/investing): “Walk around the office – short chats with others”
• “Go to the kitchen to have co-worker chats”
• Higher education (student services): “Surf LinkedIn to make connections, comment on coworkers posts, etc.”
• Marketing: “go on LinkedIn”
• Finance: “post on LinkedIn”

Review instead of generate

Reacting to work that already exists, instead of making something from scratch:

• Legal services attorney: “reviewing any work that coworkers are waiting for feedback on”
• Technology: “reviewing documents or work for others – this comes up a lot in my role. If it’s something low stakes, I do it during low energy time”
• Higher education (professor): “doing a small piece of a bigger project that doesn’t take much brain power but will help me activate easier on the bigger project next time”
• Healthcare administration: “refreshing standard data reports (minimal analysis needed)”
• “Reviewing others’ work (particularly from my reports whose work typically needs little feedback but does need my approval) as opposed to generative work”

Move the body, or take a real break

And sometimes the answer isn’t a task at all. It’s moving or stopping:

• “A walk or a house chore while listening to a work-relevant podcast”
• Agriculture: “Take a walk”; “Eat some chocolate!”
• Marketing: “just give up on my desk and go for a walk”
• Beverage and hospitality marketing: “go on a walk”
• Higher education (professor): “if I have a 20-30 minute break in meetings, I’ll lift some weights or do something else that gets me out of my chair for a while to get my energy back up”
• Corporate (finance/investing): “walk around the block or walk on my walking pad at my desk while processing email which can sometimes energize me”
• “Went for a walk”
• “get up and take a walk”
• “stopping work and doing a 30-45 min workout or walk at the 2 / 2:30pm mark, often I come back recharged, but I definitely need the mental break.”
• “Also, I often try to go walk on the treadmill/walking pad while processing emails or reading something and ironically when I feel low energy to move or work, doing this helps me feel more motivated to do both.”

Two category-defying ones!

• “Two tricks I also use are talking to Claude about how to get started on a draining task, maybe I won’t do it today but just getting the ball rolling or having a plan for tomorrow with low pressure/using AI helps me get over the activation energy.”
• “I also will use it to brain dump for future things (sort of like write drunk, edit sober)–I’m not making any decisions, just ideating (especially about pain points! When I’m tired, cranky, etc is when I’m most keyed up to think about how things could be better).”

That’s a wrap for now – though share your additions in the comments!

Grab 2-5 options, make a “Low Energy Task Options” list, experiment – and let us know how it goes!

And if it helps, you can grab a PDF of this image by clicking here:

And if you love thinking about matchmaking tasks to energy, I suspect you’ll love the Bright Method. It’s a realistic, digital calendar-basxed system built for professional working women. It brings all of your to-dos, work and personal, into one place, then layers in smart strategies for working with your real life and your real energy, not the tidy, fictional version of you who’s sharp from 9 to 5. Matching tasks to energy is a core part of it.

If you want a feel for how it works, my free 3-day Reset & Refresh is the best place to start. Three short video lessons to help you get clearer on your time and your week, no big commitment. Sign up here. Enjoy!