If you’re a busy person, you likely have to keep a schedule—for me, it’s a color-coded dry-erase board (very satisfying).

But we can always learn new ways to work smarter rather than harder. Today, Kellogg faculty share some research-backed tips on how to do just that. Plus, we hear how nurturing relationships can make us more resilient.

Tips for scheduling your day

It’s tempting to think we’ll accomplish everything on our “to do” list for the day, especially when we’ve written it right after our first cup of coffee. Cut to 7 hours later, and “I’ll do it tomorrow” might feel like a more realistic plan for the remaining items on our agenda.

Which leads us to our first tip:

Plan around end-of-day fatigue: The way you work—and the quality of that work—can depend on the time of day you do it.

Kellogg Professor Maria Ibanez and a colleague observed this when they looked at food-safety inspectors. Inspectors use a rigorous process to identify health violations at restaurants, schools, hospital cafeterias, and other places where foods are handled—but the researchers found that inspections that occurred later in the day resulted in fewer violations. Each subsequent hour an inspector conducted inspections during the day resulted in 3.7 percent fewer citations per inspection that day, likely due to fatigue.

In addition, if inspectors begin an inspection at a time that means they would not finish before their normal quitting time, they finish the inspection 4 percent more quickly than usual—and catch 5 percent fewer violations.

The takeaway here is clear: it’s worth asking yourself (and perhaps measuring) whether certain sequences of tasks or times of day change the quality of your work. “That gives us an opportunity to improve performance by being smarter about scheduling,” says Ibanez.

Our second tip for scheduling your day smarter involves expectation-setting.

Communication can be as important as scheduling: What if you could keep your schedule and productivity levels pretty much the same—but magically make everyone happier with your performance?

It sounds too good to be true. But it turns out that rethinking how (and how often) you update your clients on your progress can change how they perceive your effort. This is called “operational transparency”—the idea being that “if you can see how hard I’m working, then you’re going to appreciate it more,” says Kellogg Professor Rob Bray. Plus, customers may appreciate feeling in the loop.

Still, transparency can come with a downside. After all, if you show customers every step, they might also notice long lulls between progress reports. So how can you maximize the upside of this transparency while minimizing the dirty laundry? Bray analyzed a huge data set of package-delivery records from the giant e-commerce firm Alibaba in China and found that the timing of updates matters.

When customers got frequent status updates on their online orders toward the end of the delivery, they tended to give the service a high score. But if activity was clustered near the beginning and followed by inactivity, scores tended to be lower—even if total delivery time was the same. He suspects this pattern emerged because customers pay more attention to what happens late in the process. “Usually, people remember the end of the experience,” Bray says.

The upshot? Consider ramping up your communication during the final leg of a project—and reap the rewards.

You can read more research-backed tips on scheduling your day here.

What adversity can teach about resilience

Craig Wortmann teaches about resilience here at Kellogg but was surprised to learn a bit more about the human capacity for it during his recent battle with cancer. Wortmann, who is now (thankfully) cancer-free, shared his reflections on LinkedIn.

Even if there are no major issues in your life, that can change, and you’ll want to be ready if and when it does. To do that, Wortmann suggests considering a couple of things:

Think about where you get your energy: “What I’ve had to do over this past year is figure out: what are my sources of energy and how do I take care of them, and grow them, and nurture them, such that they are there when I need them?” Wortmann said.

Identify 6-10 things or people that act as batteries to you—they could be your friends, family, workout routine, or a pet. Whoever or whatever they are, they should energize you.

Think about what you’re doing to nurture those energy sources: What are the big and little things you can do to make sure that you’re keeping those batteries safe and powered-up?

If that source of energy is a person, for example, Wortmann wants you to reach out and thank that person. No, really.

“Do that right now,” he says.

You can watch his video on resilience here. He’ll be sharing more about his experience and what he’s learned from it on his LinkedIn.