The Power of Energy Peaks: Managing Productivity and Burnout

When it comes to managing productivity and avoiding burnout, understanding our energy peaks and valleys is crucial. According to Jay, who has found success by identifying and working with his natural energy rhythms, our bodies have a natural ebb and flow of energy throughout the day. "Your energy really comes in peaks and waves," he explains. "If you're able to work at some of those peaks, you can be extremely productive." However, when we're on the bottom of those waves, taking breaks is essential to avoid burnout.

Jay advocates for recognizing and working with these natural energy patterns rather than trying to force ourselves into a rigid schedule or routine. By identifying our peak hours and being mindful of our energy levels, we can optimize our productivity and make the most of our time. For Jay, this means using his morning coffee as a catalyst for high-energy work, followed by a mid-afternoon surge, and then another energy boost in the evening.

To manage these energy peaks effectively, Jay relies on a combination of self-care practices, including exercise and mindfulness. "I try to go to the gym every day," he says. "I also find that going for walks helps clear my mind and reduce stress." He's also experimented with biohacking techniques like adjusting his diet and timing to optimize his energy levels.

One key strategy Jay has found helpful is taking breaks during low-energy periods. Rather than pushing through, he prioritizes tasks that don't require intense focus or critical thinking. "I find that things like writing, creative work, or brainstorming are much more productive when I'm not feeling my highest level of energy," he explains. By acknowledging his limitations and being strategic about how he spends his time, Jay can maximize his productivity while avoiding burnout.

Another crucial aspect of managing energy peaks is protecting one's calendar. For Jay, this means carefully curating meetings and appointments to avoid overcommitting himself. "When I have three or four meetings in a day, by the end of that, I feel mentally drained," he says. By being mindful of his schedule and making intentional choices about how he uses his time, Jay can conserve his energy and maintain focus throughout the day.

By embracing our natural energy patterns and working with them rather than against them, we can optimize our productivity and avoid burnout. As Jay demonstrates, recognizing our peak hours, taking breaks, prioritizing self-care, and protecting our calendar are all essential strategies for making the most of our time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the AI mins podcast this is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built AI first I am your host as always Dimitri o and this episode is brought to you by the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the internet deep gram it's trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like twio NASA City Bank and good old Spotify we are joined today by my man Jay the founder of Summer eyes how you doing Jay doing well thanks for having me on the show super excited to chat today well I know that you are a marketer by trade you've started summarize and have been having some awesome success I want to get into what the product does and your inspiration behind it but I would really love to hear a little bit about your journey before you started the product how you got the entrepreneurial bug per se and this isn't your first rodeo is it no um so I am definitely one of the people that prescribes to that uh idea that to have a successful business you kind of have to go through through a couple of failure tries yeah so I worked on a couple of my own products um with a technical co-founder and then you know even though those products didn't work out I I knew I wanted to build something of my own and so when I had another opportunity to build a product um I I decided to take it and and work on it and it was really just solving one of my own core problems um and was able to work with that same technical co-founder and now we actually have a real business which is which is really exciting um to to kind of work on well from what I understand you had a lot of success with one of your previous products and Company swipely can you explain the success but almost like this tension that you had yeah so swipely was the first product that I really launched on my own and it was the idea of it was like it was like Pinterest for to be essentially so you could save uh you know your content inspiration and those kinds of things that's something as a marketer I always felt like I was running into a problem with I'd see something cool I'd see something that people were talking about and I wanted to like save that idea and being someone that was working on my own like LinkedIn audience as well I had a lot of marketers in my network and so I kind of figured like hey I have the entrepreneurial bug I want to build this product and and I also have potentially the audience sell to it's like let's try this out and see how it goes and it was a really big learning experience for me so that time when I built the product you know I spent uh thousands and thousands of dollars of my own money um to to work on it and was able to build up get a bunch of signups uh you know thou tens of thousands of users to the product which was really exciting to see um especially like working on my own product but one of the hardest things that I found was figuring out how to monetize the product um that was my biggest challenge um and unfortunately I was not successful in that Venture in that sense um but it taught me a lot of lessons it it taught me about you know how to go to market a little bit better how to monetize earlier how to potentially test an idea and validate an idea without having to spend as muchoney Mone uh and those are some of the core lessons that I took into working on summarize um and I I think is a big reason why the business is successful right now is because I was able to take some of those lessons from failing um in this other try so when you created summarize was part of the criteria of your next ACT something that you had a clear definition of how to monetize from day one yeah so I I knew I wanted to monetize from day one there was a few things that I think were really important when I tell me about what those things were yeah when I put together this like new Venture one was I wanted to be able to monetize up front I think one of the hardest things for any like firsttime founder is to be able to like put a price tag on something and be able to potentially charge like a high amount and things like that because you kind of get nervous like well will people buy this will people pay for this uh will I be able to do that should I just try and get as many people like aware of this as possible but I think it's really important to monetize up front especially if you're going to be bootstrapping which we are so like that was one thing that was really important for me the second thing that was really important for me was figuring out how to validate with the least amount of money spent so for swipely like I said when I worked on it and built that I spent tens of thousands of uh dollars of my own money on building the product this time uh we only spent 300 bucks uh to like create a a functioning MVP with no and low code tools to really validate the idea and see if people were willing to pay for it so you built the first version with no and low code tools can you break that down how did you go about it yeah so actually deep gram was like uh pretty instrumental in that so uh you know we use uh we that only take uh so we repurpose long form audio and video content um into other like text based assets and clips and things like that um and so basically what we did is you know we were a I was able to hack together some apis and things like that um with some existing AI models to kind of put together the content assets that we needed too and we've since evolved uh past that uh and we have like you know I have a technical co-founder that knows how to leverage Ai and knows a a lot more about you know large language learning models than I do um so we have a more robust product but I mean the first version was basically just hack together apis um to to put it together now talk to me about the product inspiration how did you Zone in into this space and know that you wanted to create it so I'm a big believer in that if you're able to be your customers or your your product's first customer that you might be on to something really good so I'm I'm a big believer that you should be trying to to figure out and find products from solving your own problems and so that was a big inspiration for summarized uh I've hosted a podcast before uh I've been on podcast before I've done Consulting for podcasts before um and a lot of the work that I've done actually is repurposing podcast so you know once you have that podcast recording turning it into getting summaries from it turning into social content getting it on your website uh pulling out quotes pulling out insights all of those kinds of things and um I always say that the podcast like any sort of podcast work I've done um it was always my favorite job at the beginning because it was new it was exciting I I get excited when I work on new things and then it quickly became my least favorite job in most cases because the work after was very repetitive the conversations were great so awesome to get to meet with some amazing people and and learn from amazing people but doing the repurposing tasks was something it was robotic it felt like and I was like I I don't want to be doing this I was spending you know one to two hours uh a week on on each of these episodes and doing the same thing and it was really the the least favorite task that I look forward to every every week and so I was like there's got to be a better way to do this and that was right around the cusp of AI really becoming uh popular and so that's kind of what motivated me to to figure out and kind of work together and hack together by own solution for for myself so that was the seed that was planted and then how has the product been evolving over these last couple years yeah so the way that we've kind of um so the product is totally different than I think what we started and one thing I didn't mention in terms of like how we hacked it together the first version of the product which actually got I was shocked that it got customers and like I I think that just told me like how little you might need to potentially actually validate uh a monetized like idea uh the first version of the product was literally uh you had a form you'd fill out you'd put in your file in the form you'd submit it and then 5 to 10 minutes later you'd get a Google doc back with all of your content assets like your LinkedIn post your your transcript your emails your summaries all that stuff so we've we've evolved a lot since then um you know we actually have like a full product there's a login there wasn't a login when when there was the form in Google Docs version uh but you know you can log into the product now and like the way that we've evolved is um we've added a lot more templates that people can build people can even customize and create their own assets we've been able to uh kind of put in features as well into the product that helps get the content closer to that person's voice and own writing style um we've put together um you know people can create their own brand and essentially within the product and kind of use that so that way summarize when it's creating content assets it's sounding more like you it's talking more like you it's writing more like you would do uh We've added like video clips lots of different lots of different features and bells and whistles and uh We've we've redesigned the product a couple of times now um you know my I have a background of marketing my co-founder um his background is uh fullstack engineering but he's not a product designer so we were to get a product designer and kind of clean a lot of those things up and you know now we've seen a lot of growth um in terms of people signing up people converting into business actually this this month that we're talking in right now has been our highest revenue month so far um which is really exciting um and we're talking about bringing in a developer as well to kind of like work on things so yeah things are continuing to evolve and we're just working and figuring out more ways that we can add value to our customers and how do you you go about knowing which features to add is it I I imagine there's a little bit of intuition there because you know what you like and you are as you said one of your own best customers you dog food the product but then when you talk to customers I always Envision the product manager's job to be so confusing because you're probably getting pulled in a million different ways One customer wants this another customer says no that's not important I really want that and how do you weigh out all of these different asks yeah I think so the first thing we really try and focus on um number one priority is like what do our paying customers what more of um so we have like the way our product works is you can sign up for a trial the first upload is basically free um to like test out the product and and see if you like it and then if you decide to move forward um you know you'll either do a subscription or we also have do just like deepgram we also have a pay as you go model um and from that from our paying customers those are the ones that we really try and stay super close to and if we see that there's a lot of high volume and uploading we'll go out and ask like hey like what else do you want to see in this product what else can we build for you uh you know we'll still get lots of requests through our live chat and stuff like that from any type of user uh and so the big thing that we do in terms of prioritization prioritize the highest paying customers first um prioritize the total customer base uh and then we look at maybe requests from other people um that have kind of come in and just kind of like use that with a mix like you said use it with a mixup gut essentially so you know i' I've worked on podcasts for like four or five 5 years at this point I kind of know like what features are are pretty necessary and helpful um to help either save time or deliver more value from the existing product um and that's kind of what we use to to kind of figure out and then we also stay really close um to to the ground with what else is going on in the market first of all with what's available through some of the providers that we integrate with and then the second thing is figuring out what our competitors are are working on as well cuz I think um you know since we started when we started there there weren't really many players in the space um we were like pretty much I think like second one to Market um and now there's a lot more competitors so just kind of like understanding and seeing where everyone else is going and figuring out where we can kind of carve out our own own Niche which I think is is really important you know we don't want to be just another copy of another product or someone else have a copy exactly of our product we need to have uh a unique set of features a unique set of value props that we can offer um so that way we are able to convince people to to convert and use our product bar so at the risk of derailing this whole conversation I want to take it in a different direction because you dropped a little Easter egg before we hit record on how you've been able to to keep your personal energy up high and you've been figuring out some tips and tricks on what works best for you can you explain that a little bit more because as a Founder I imagine you're constantly getting bombarded with fires that you have to deal with and it's easy to get a little bit burnt out uh so what are you doing yeah there's a few things that I do and I feel like I've gotten a little bit better at this and I'm not going to say I'm not going to come here and say like I figured out like the the the best and yeah the perfect answer anything like that so like the caveat is this works for me maybe it works for someone else maybe it doesn't um a few things that I do I really like to first of all I focus on trying to get through all of my deep work tasks um like things that you know I really need to carve out and spend a lot of energy on um in the morning that's something that's really important to me um I will also make sure and try and work really off my energy Peaks uh and you can kind of like there there's stuff on this too like that's uh available to like research which I I personally prescribed to which is like you know your energy really comes in Peaks and waves and like if you're able to work at some of those Peaks like you can be extremely productive um and when you're on the bottom of those those waves like taking a break like honestly like you don't need to be you don't need to be at your computer for like 12 14 hours straight to to make meaningful progress It's really like hey how can I juice out the the hours that are really um that that are really my highest energy my highest productivity um those kinds of things U I'm also a really big advocate of uh having a a healthyish lifestyle I would say so you know I I try and make sure and go to the gym every day I try and go for a walk when I can um I found those things to really help to to get rid of a lot of stress and and clear my mind a little bit um and then I've also gotten recently into just a little bit of like personal like biohacking like even in terms of my diet and stuff like that like what I eat and when I eat it like you know I'm not I'm not a big fan of like uh trying to have like a super meal like at lunch or things like that um because I find that I usually end up getting a little bit tired like after that so figuring out ways to kind of like manage what I'm what I'm consuming how I'm being Physically Active um how I'm working off of my energy Peaks um those things have been really uh really helpful for me um and I think it helps to provide the maximum amount of energy that I can get and anytime I can find something that potentially like uh like naturally that I feel can help and boost my energy my focus um I'm all for giving it a try because um ultimately like the more High Peaks I can create um the the more I can get done do you notice how many of the high peaks you have per day and you've totally inspired me I'm going to take my next call walking just to set that right now but how many Peaks do you generally have in a day yeah I would say so the morning like you know once I got my morning coffee in there's definitely like a big one over there um usually about like mid to mid to late afternoon like for me that's like around like 2: to 4:00 p.m. I feel like another big rush of energy um and then usually like uh evenings like late night too like I can uh gather up another big big like energy burst as well and so between that time what I try and do is I do try and take breaks maybe and you know that might be like hey like I'm trying to take a break like at like you know 1:00 or something because I know that my energy is not going to be high enough and that's a good opportunity to do something else where I don't really necessarily need to do like as much critical thinking and it's more of just like things that I can do that are doing fun F versus like me having to Think Through how to how to put this together so like things like you know write it creative writing tasks or uh like brainstorming or like anything else that's like deep work related like some of those tasks just don't work at at some of those times for me and so like figuring like even like me meetings are great to like plug in during those times because like I know like I've got to be there and I I can show up and you know can I can talk through things but I don't necessarily have to be at my highest level of energy on every single meeting um to be able to to get through stuff um so yeah that's that's been really big for me is like um I also try and be really protective of my calendar um because I find for me personally and like I said I don't think it's the case for everyone for me personally when I have like three or four meetings in a day um by the time I get to the end of that like I feel just like mentally drained um I don't know if it's like having to be on the in front of the camera for so long or like talking or what it is but um yeah so any of those things that I can try and figure out and kind of manage and control uh and kind of create my own schedule I find that I'm able to work a lot better in that sense excellent well Jay thank you so much for coming on here and chatting with me this has been a blast man yeah thanks for having me uh super fun conversation and we got to talk about a lot a lot of things that sometimes I don't get to talk about as much in other podcasts excellent\n"