Book SummaryAt Your Best, by Carey Nieuwhof

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of At Your Best

Why do we often try so hard to build our dream lives, only to find ourselves in a nightmare of endless stress and frustration? In At Your Best (2021), Carey Nieuwhof teaches you how to effectively manage your time, energy, and priorities so you can break free from the endless grind and start creating the life you want. Nieuwhof’s system works with your natural cycles of high and low energy to maximize your productivity and minimize stress. The key to success, he says, is simple: Do what you’re best at, and do it when you’re “at your best.”

Nieuwhof is a lawyer-turned-pastor who led a rapidly growing multisite church in the Toronto area for two decades. This experience pushed him into severe burnout in 2006,...

At Your Best Summary Three Assets: Time, Energy, and Priorities

Nieuwhof begins with the fundamental idea that everyone has three key assets to spend each day: time, energy, and priorities. If you manage those three assets well, they’ll work together to create a positive feedback loop of productivity and success where each day is a little better than the day before.

In this section we’ll explain why managing your time, energy, and priorities creates this cycle and what happens instead when you don’t manage them well. Then, we’ll discuss how you can plan your schedule to build and sustain a virtuous cycle of achievement.

Build a Positive Feedback Loop

Nieuwhof says that people in a positive feedback loop share three key traits:

1. They understand they have a limited number of highly productive hours each day.
2. They cooperate with their natural energy patterns by matching their most important tasks to their peak performance windows.
3. They develop strategies to protect their priorities and accomplish what matters most.

(Shortform note: In Laziness Does Not Exist, social psychologist Devon Price clarifies that most people have a peak performance...

At Your Best Summary Manage Your Time and Energy

Now that we’ve explained Nieuwhof’s system and the ultimate goal of creating a positive feedback loop of productivity and self-improvement, it’s time to go over how the system actually works. In this section, we’ll discuss how to find and leverage your peak performance times—those few hours each day when your energy is highest. We’ll then explore how you can still use your lower-energy periods effectively.

Find Your Peak Performance Window

Nieuwhof says everyone has three to five hours each day when they’re at their best: energetic, clear-headed, and focused. The key to his entire system is to find those hours when your energy is highest, and use them to the fullest.

Everyone’s high energy hours are different. To find yours, pay attention to your productivity levels and mood throughout the day, and look for patterns over time. For instance, you might find that you start your day with a huge burst of energy and then grow tired a few hours later. Conversely, you may realize that you tend to be sluggish in the morning and you don’t hit your stride until after lunch.

Nieuwhof also suggests asking your colleagues, family, or close friends for their insights. Because...

At Your Best Summary Manage Your Priorities

We’ve discussed how to effectively manage your time and energy, two of the three elements of Nieuwhof’s system. Managing the third element, priorities, is really about managing people. After all, if you didn’t have other people interrupting you and making demands on your time, you’d have no problem sticking to your own priorities.

In this final section, we’ll discuss how and why other people hijack your priorities so frequently. We’ll then explain how you can protect your priorities—and your relationships—by learning how to turn people down in a way that’s both respectful and firm.

(Shortform note: This framing treats other people primarily as obstacles to be managed, which may reinforce an individualistic ideal where you prioritize productivity and achieve it by insulating yourself from others. In The Second Mountain, cultural commentator David Brooks suggests that this overlooks the benefits of relationalism—an approach to life that...

Shortform Exercise: Start Building Your Positive Feedback Loop

You’ve just read about Nieuwhof’s method for finding and leveraging your peak performance windows. Now, take some time to consider how you can make the most of your three key assets (time, energy, and priorities) to start building the life you want for yourself.

Assess how well you’re currently managing your time, energy, and priorities. Do you feel like you generally accomplish what’s most important, or are you always scrambling to catch up?