Mainstream productivity was built for someone with uninterrupted hours, a body that runs the same every day, and somebody else carrying the load. A mother has none of those, and the system's answer is to make her feel like the failure.

By Anna Cave-Bigley

For about nine days, I was a member of the 5am club. I had the book, the journal, the glass of lukewarm lemon water set out the night before like an offering. On the tenth morning I slept through the alarm with a small body starfished across my chest, woke at seven to chaos, and cried in the shower, because the obvious conclusion was that the problem was me. I was not disciplined enough. I was not getting up early enough. I was not, in the language of every productivity book I had ever read, winning the morning.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see it the other way round. The problem was never my output. The problem was that every system I was measuring myself against had been built for somebody who is not me.

The system was built for someone else

Picture the person mainstream productivity is written for. He has long, uninterrupted blocks of time. His body and energy run more or less the same from one day to the next. And crucially, there is someone else, somewhere, handling the invisible scaffolding of his life so that his attention is free. Of course he can rise at five and seize the day. Nobody is going to wake him at four to be sick down his back.

That invisible scaffolding has a name now. Sociologists call it cognitive labour, and a landmark study by Allison Daminger defined it as the anticipating, the deciding, the constant monitoring that keeps a household running, work that is taxing and relentless and largely invisible even to the people doing it. In most households, women carry the lion's share of it. So consider what we are being asked to do: run the world's least visible full-time operations job, on broken sleep, and then feel inadequate for not also journaling at dawn.

Mothers are some of the most productive people alive. The output was never in question. What needed throwing out was a definition of productivity written by and for someone living a completely different life.

Cyclical, not linear

The first thing to go is the idea that you should perform identically every day. You are not a machine, and you do not run at a flat hum from Monday to Sunday. Energy and focus move, across the day and across the month, and the trick is to stop fighting that and start building around it.

Take the day. We are not all wired to the same clock. Some people are sharpest at six in the morning, and some of us are staring at a wall until ten and then lucid until midnight. The research on whether your "peak" hours give you a true performance boost is mixed, but what is not in doubt is that forcing an early-bird schedule onto a body that is not built for it just means working through sleep loss and your own low ebb. So stop assigning your most demanding work to 6am because a book told you to. Put it in the window where you are clear-headed, whenever that falls.

Then there is the month. Across a cycle, your energy, your patience and your appetite for hard things shift. Rather than expecting peak output every week and treating the low weeks as a personal failing, plan the big pushes for when you have the fuel, and let the quieter weeks be quieter. That is not laziness. That is reading your own instrument panel.

Honour the sleep you get

The 5am club nearly finished me, and the science explains why it was always going to. Sleep is not the thing you heroically sacrifice to look disciplined. It is the foundation every other hour stands on. Short sleep measurably impairs judgement and decision-making, pushing people towards riskier and poorer choices, which means trading sleep for an extra working hour makes every remaining hour worse. You do not come out ahead. You come out slower, foggier and more likely to make the kind of decision you spend the next day undoing.

So protect the sleep you can get, fiercely and without apology. If your nights are already broken by someone small, that is all the more reason not to hand away the sleep that is still yours to keep. (The night-time side of this, the 3am wide-awake problem, has its own piece on the journal.)

Build the day to be interrupted

Here is the reframe that changed everything for me. The interruption is not a flaw in your day. The interruption is the day. A plan that shatters the second someone needs you was never a plan, it was a fantasy borrowed from someone with a closed office door.

So build for it. Front-load the thinking. Do the decisions and the hard cognitive work in your clearest window, early if you can, because decision-making degrades as the hours and your reserves run down, and faster still when you are under-slept. By the time everyone detonates at five o'clock, the goal is to have nothing left on the list that requires a functioning prefrontal cortex. The wins are banked. What is left can survive a tantrum.

The supports that hold

This is my own routine, not a prescription, and your body and your stage are yours to manage with someone who knows them. With that said, here is what holds my day up.

The wake-up: daylight before screens, because morning light is the cleanest signal your body clock has. Then coffee, and for the caffeine-sensitive, a little l-theanine, the green-tea amino acid that takes the jittery edge off without dulling you.

The day: I lean on the gentler adaptogens, Rhodiola chief among them, the herbs traditionally used to support the body through stress and fatigue. The evidence is real but mixed, some trials show a benefit for mental fatigue and others do not, so I hold them lightly. A word on safety, because the usual advice flattens it: Rhodiola is a daytime herb with a long traditional use that runs through the postpartum and breastfeeding period, and many practitioners who work with mothers treat it as compatible with feeding, though the formal data is thin. Pregnancy is the firmer line. As with anything, that is a decision for you and your provider, not a rule from me. Magnesium rounds it out.

The unwind: phone out of reach, lights down, and a cup of The Calm, a caffeine-free blend of herbs traditionally used to help the body settle at the end of the day. It is the full stop on my working hours, the cue that says the doing is done.

Because the most productive thing I do all day is stop.

Anna Xx

The science, sourced

• The invisible cognitive load women carry: Daminger, The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor (American Sociological Review)

• Sleep loss and decision-making: Examining the Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Decision-Making, a scoping review

• Chronotype, time of day and performance: Chronotype, Time of Day, and Performance on Intelligence Tests

• L-theanine and the caffeine edge: Hidese et al., Effects of L-theanine administration on stress-related symptoms and cognitive functions, a randomised controlled trial

• Rhodiola for mental and physical fatigue, the mixed evidence: Rhodiola rosea for physical and mental fatigue, a systematic review

DISCLAIMER

The SABI blog and articles are not meant to instruct or advise on medical or health conditions, but to inform. The information and opinions presented here do not substitute professional medical advice or consultations with healthcare professionals for your unique situation.

ABOUT ANNA

Anna is a Co-founder of The SABI and has spent the past 13 years working in or for governments, senior businessmen and politicians around the world. Living in Bogota, Colombia, she recently renovated one of Colombia's oldest and most iconic coffee estates, developing a unique taste and travel experience. She lives with her husband and three boys Lorenzo, Alfie and Salvador who are responsible for the beautiful journey that inspired her to pursue The Sabi.

HORMONAL & PROUD

The SABI was created to help women through the hardest moments of pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum and every stage that follows. We want to change the story around our hormones, from one of taboo, embarrassment and loneliness to one of awareness, and even pride.

More than a wellness brand, The SABI is a line of rituals, supportive tools and functional herbal remedies, tested by hundreds of years of traditional medicine and now backed by modern science. It was conceived by women who have lived the joys and the deeper costs of bringing a child into the world, of a heavy or difficult period, of miscarriage and trouble conceiving.

Consider this an invitation to know your body and its cycles, to learn to work with them at any stage of life, and to know that support exists. Look for the right sources, know there is help, and know that you are not on your own.