Why You Should Drink Coffee at 4 pm

How to supercharge your life one energetic afternoon at a time

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Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is one of my all-time favorite books. For context, I’ve read it every year for three years straight. It’s a book loaded with insights and ideas for living better on borrowed time.

While I know much of the top writing in our culture right now is shifting from mediocre topics like time management (i.e. Oliver Burkeman’s writing on how we only have Four Thousand Weeks and they can’t be managed, blazee blazee), I think there’s still something to be said for the recommendations they make in the book.

Why 4 pm?

In the book, they talk about the all-too-common afternoon slump. This usually happens after lunch, and also happens when the day starts to drag and get more boring. For me, this is almost always around 4pm. At 3, I’m still riding the high of a break from lunch. But at 4, I’m getting hungrier, I’m getting tired, and I need a pick me up.

The case for coffee

I think it’s fascinating that we use the word “use” for things like drugs and alcohol. We talk about people being “users” of certain substances. While I don’t mean to imply that I’m addicted to caffeine, I’m certainly a “user” of it. In the…