For about 3-4 months after the twins were born, I tried to be a 5am person so hard.
I'd read the books, I'd seen the podcasts, I’d watched the TikTok’s. Every founder & Dad I respected seemed to have some version of the same story: wake up before the world, journal, work out, make breakfast for their partner & get an hour or so of deep work done before breakfast. That's how you win.
So I set my alarm, 4:55am. Every morning. And for a few weeks, it kinda worked… sort of. I'd sit at my desk in the dark, half-awake, staring at a couple of docs I barely had the brain to read, feeling like I was earning something just by being upright.
Then one of the girls would actually wake up at 5:30. Then the other one. Then my wife would be up with them, so I’d go grab them, and whatever fragile little productivity bubble I'd built would pop before I'd done anything meaningful with it.
I kept trying. Kept dragging myself out of bed. Kept telling myself this is what serious founders do.
Until one Thursday morning, I sat down at my desk at 5:02am, opened my laptop, and just... stared. For twenty minutes. Couldn't think. Couldn't write. Couldn't do anything except feel tired after being awake half the night and vaguely resentful that this was supposed to be the answer.
I closed the laptop, went back to bed, and never set that alarm again.
Here's what I got wrong about productivity.
I was solving for time when I should have been solving for energy. The 5am club isn't really about waking up early, it's about protecting your best cognitive hours for your best work. The problem is, when you're sleep-deprived with newborn twins, 5am isn't your best cognitive hour. It's your worst.
My actual peak window starts around 8:30, after the morning chaos settles. But I was wasting it. Every single day. I'd get to my desk and immediately open my inbox. Slack. LinkedIn notifications. Someone else's priorities. By the time I got to the work that actually moves the business forward like the prospect calls, the strategy, the sales decks, I was running on whatever cognitive scraps were left after two hours of reacting.
I wasn't underworking. I was misallocating.
That's the thing nobody talks about. Time management isn't the game, energy management is, and most ambitious people are getting it completely wrong. Not because they're lazy, but because they're spending their sharpest hours on the lowest-value tasks.
So I started doing something simple. Every morning, before I open anything, I ask: what's the one thing today that actually moves the needle? And I do that first. That morning window is for revenue-generating work, strategic thinking, the stuff that compounds.
Everything else like the admin, the LinkedIn commenting, the internal calls, the inbox… that gets pushed to the afternoon, after lunch, when my energy dips anyway. Turns out those tasks don't need my best thinking, they just need doing.
And then 5:30. Hard stop. Not because I'm disciplined, but because I learned the hard way that if I bleed into the evening, I'm borrowing from tomorrow's peak hours, because there I am at 10pm after everyone’s in bed, finishing stuff off. And the interest rate on that loan is brutal.
The surprising thing? I didn't lose anything & I didn't drop balls. I didn't do less. I just stopped pretending all hours are equal and started treating my best energy like what it is: a finite resource I was haemorrhaging on other people's inboxes.
The takeaway:
Performance isn't about doing more. It's about protecting what matters.
There's a version of ambition that looks like grinding from 5am to midnight & I've done it. It works, for a while, until you realise you've been productive but not present. Busy but not building. Running hard but in no particular direction.
The version I'm building now is different. It's being sharp on a sales call at 10am and being fully there with my daughters at 6pm. Not because I've found more hours in the day, but because I've stopped treating every hour the same.
The girls didn't just change my mornings, they changed the way I think about what a good day actually looks like. And it turns out, a good day doesn't start at 5am. It starts with knowing where your energy goes and refusing to waste it on things that don't matter.
See you next week.
— Antonio