Workshop · one live day, then ten weeks of light tracking · for researchers and the institutions that train them
Working with Your Biology, Not Against It
You have a body that runs on rhythms, and a schedule that ignores all of them. A workshop, then ten weeks of light tracking, to find your real ones from your own data and rebuild your working week around them, the way an athlete periodises a season.
Who this workshop is for
This workshop is for researchers fighting their own rhythms to fit an institutional clock, and for institutions ready to stop pretending everyone performs identically at 09:00.
This is for you if:
- Your energy, focus and mood swing in ways your calendar ignores
- You override your body until it forces the issue, then judge yourself for it
- You want to build your working week from your own rhythm data
It is not another optimisation system for extracting more output: if anything, it asks you to extract less and recover better.
The rhythms you can’t see from a lecture
Most productivity advice treats you as a machine that should output evenly from nine to five. Your biology disagrees, on at least three timescales at once. Across the day, your alertness rises and falls on a roughly ninety-minute cycle. Across the twenty-four hours, your chronotype sets when your mind is truly sharp and when it is merely awake. And for those who menstruate, a monthly rhythm shifts energy, sleep and symptoms in ways that are real, if widely misunderstood. Schedule your hardest thinking against these rhythms and you fight yourself all day. Schedule it with them and the same work costs less.
Here is the problem no workshop can solve in a room: you cannot be told your rhythms. They are yours, specifically, and the only way to know them is to watch your own body over real time. That is why this is a programme and not a talk. You gather your own data first, then we help you read it, then you rebuild your week around what it actually says.
Three rhythms, sourced with care
The workshop works with three evidence-based rhythms, and it is plain about how strong the evidence is for each, because that plainness is the difference between science and horoscopes.
The ultradian cycle (every ~90 minutes). Your waking alertness oscillates on a roughly ninety-minute basic rest-activity cycle: a stretch of sharp focus, then a genuine dip. Fighting the dip with caffeine and willpower is how afternoons collapse; working with it, in focused blocks followed by real recovery, is how researchers reclaim the deep-work hours the day keeps eating. Evidence: well documented across lab and real-world studies since Kleitman; the block length itself is individual, which is why you measure your own [1].
Your chronotype (across the day). Whether you are truly wired early, late or in between, and therefore when your mind is actually at its best. This is not a preference or a discipline problem; it is substantially biological. The workshop helps you find yours and, crucially, tell a true evening type from a habit that drifted late, because the fix is opposite for each; our article on night owls and depression shows what the unmanaged mismatch costs. Evidence: strong. Chronotype is roughly 50% heritable in twin studies, with multiple genes identified [2].
The menstrual cycle, framed accurately (across the month). For those who menstruate, this is a further real rhythm, but it must be described with care. The best current evidence finds that cognitive performance, memory, attention, problem-solving, does not reliably change across the cycle; the idea that your thinking gets worse at certain phases is a myth the research does not support. What does vary, for many though not all, is energy, sleep quality, body temperature and premenstrual symptoms, particularly in the luteal phase. So we treat it as an energy-and-recovery rhythm to plan around, never as a reason to doubt anyone’s mind. Evidence: a 2025 meta-analysis of 102 studies found no robust cyclic effect on cognition [3]; physiological and sleep changes across the cycle are separately documented [4]. Optional, private, and only for those it helps.
Why ten weeks, and not two days
This is the one topic in our catalogue that cannot be compressed, because the thing being taught only becomes visible over a real stretch of time. You cannot see a ninety-minute cycle in a lecture, you cannot separate a true chronotype from a habit without watching both work days and free days, and a monthly rhythm takes, by definition, a month. So the workshop is built as a genuine implementation arc: gather the data, read it together, redesign the week, then live the redesign long enough to know it holds.
What you will take away
- Your actual rhythms, measured, not guessed: your ultradian block length, your true chronotype, and for those tracking it, your own energy pattern across the month.
- A working week redesigned around them, with deep work, shallow work and recovery placed where your biology can actually deliver them.
- Before-and-after data showing what changed, collected by you.
- A defensible answer to the guilt: arriving when your biology performs, and resting when it dips, is how sustainable performers work, not how lazy ones do.
The pattern researchers describe, once they stop scheduling against themselves, is not that they work more hours. It is that the hours they work cost less. One participant, after learning to place tasks by energy rather than by clock:
“I pick my tasks and place them in the duration of a day according to my own capacities and my biological rhythms (circadian and ultradian cycles) and not more than fits in such a day. It is way less overwhelming to start such a day.”
Participant, Fast Forward, April 2025 class
A lighter introduction, plainly bounded
An awareness-level talk or crash course can teach the science of these rhythms and is worth running, for example within a wellbeing or productivity week. What it cannot do is show anyone their own rhythms, because that takes weeks of their own data by definition. So we offer the short format plainly as an introduction that explains the rhythms and cannot reveal yours, and position the full programme as the way to actually find and use them. This distinction is also what separates this workshop from our Sleep Masterclass: sleep’s core fixes are known and universal enough for a shorter format, whereas your personal rhythms require the longer tracked arc by their nature.
The format at a glance, every stage, and how much it asks of you
Just enough science to make tracking informed, then the method itself. The design principle is minimum viable tracking: two or three quick data points a day, energy at set times, sleep, and an optional private cycle-day note, because anything heavier collapses within a week. Privacy is established here: all tracking is yours, sharing is always optional, and the system is built so anyone can work with their own data without disclosing what kind it is.
Four weeks of light self-observation. One full cycle for anyone tracking that rhythm; more than enough for everyone to see their ultradian pattern and their true chronotype emerge across both work days and free days. You are building the dataset the intensive is based on.
You read your own dataset and find your signatures: where your real peaks and troughs fall, which chronotype you actually are, where your energy dips predictably. Then you rebuild your working week around them, deep work placed at your peaks, shallow work and meetings at your troughs, recovery scheduled rather than hoped for. This is where the athlete’s logic lands: training load matched to the body’s real cycles, not the calendar’s assumptions.
Four weeks running your rhythm-matched week, with light continued tracking and buddy pairs for accountability. Some placements will work at once; some need adjusting; the tracking tells you which.
Your before-and-after, measured against your own baseline: what changed when you stopped fighting your biology. We troubleshoot what has not shifted and you decide what stays.
For coordinators
This is the productivity programme for the researchers who have tried every time-management system and still feel like they are pushing water uphill, because the systems all assumed a body that runs evenly, and theirs does not. It is also, handled well, a quietly important equity signal: it treats biological variation, including the menstrual cycle, as something to plan around rather than apologise for, while being scrupulous not to pathologise anyone’s mind. It runs hybrid by design, in English, in small groups, for doctoral candidates and postdocs at any stage, and maps onto both the wellbeing and the digital-era skills themes of the Vitae Researcher Development Framework 2025.
Tell us your group, timing and whether you want the full programme, the introductory talk, or both, and we will come back with a concrete proposal.
Who leads it
DR. NADINE SINCLAIR
Dr Nadine Sinclair is a Managing Director of Mind Matters and co-creator of the Personal Resilience Indicator. A scientist by training with doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, she brings the rigour this topic needs: the discipline to separate what the evidence supports from what merely sounds appealing. She has 30,000+ hours of hands-on project management experience, built across 18 years as a strategy consultant, at McKinsey and as an independent consultant. She has trained over 1,500 researchers across Europe in matching how they work to how they are actually built.
PAUL SINCLAIR
Paul Sinclair is a Managing Director of Mind Matters and a certified breathwork practitioner, bringing the body-awareness and recovery side of this work: noticing your own energy shifts and building genuine recovery into the day. A former athlete trained in load-and-recovery cycles and a former Royal Navy engineer, he is a certified Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, one of a small group personally trained and certified by Dr Gabor Maté over two and a half years.
One guardrail before any of it: this is not another optimisation system for squeezing more work out of yourself. The dip is not a design fault. Recovery is not dead time; withdrawal, incubation and low-energy periods are often part of the process that produces the work. If tracking your rhythms ends with even your rest carrying a performance target, we have failed. And the workshop includes the layer data alone never fixes: most researchers do not override their bodies because they lack information, they override them because stopping makes them anxious, so guilt, self-trust and the fear that listening to the body means becoming less committed are part of the material, not a footnote.
Frequently asked questions
Your waking alertness runs on a roughly ninety-minute basic rest-activity cycle: a stretch of sharp focus, then a genuine dip. Fighting the dip with caffeine and willpower is how afternoons collapse. Working with it, in focused blocks followed by real recovery, is how researchers reclaim deep-work hours; the block length is individual, which is why the workshop has you measure your own.
Real, and substantially biological: twin studies put chronotype heritability at roughly 50%, with multiple genes identified. The practical question is not whether it is real but which you are, because a true evening type and a drifted habit need opposite fixes, and only a stretch of your own data across work days and free days can tell them apart.
The best current evidence says no: a 2025 meta-analysis across 102 studies found no robust cyclic effect on memory, attention or problem-solving. What does vary for many, though not all, is energy, sleep quality and premenstrual symptoms, particularly in the luteal phase. The workshop treats the cycle as an energy-and-recovery rhythm to plan around, never as a reason to doubt anyone’s mind, and tracking it is optional and private.
Because the thing being taught only becomes visible over real time. A ninety-minute cycle cannot be seen in a lecture, a true chronotype cannot be separated from habit without both work days and free days, and a monthly rhythm takes a month by definition. Four weeks of tracking, an intensive to read the data and redesign the week, four weeks living the redesign, and a follow-up to lock in what held.
Give them a week that costs less to live
If energy and overload keep surfacing in your cohort, this workshop gives each researcher a working week built on their own rhythm data, and gives you the aggregate picture without anyone’s private tracking ever leaving their hands.
