Stop Trying to Manage Your Time

Do this instead

Kim Witten, PhD
6 min readAug 22, 2023

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A wall clock it blurred into an ethereal yellow background of stars. Text reads, “Manage your energy, not your time.”
Background image by STILLFX from Getty Images. Arranged with text by author in Canva Pro.

One of the biggest red herrings in most the productivity advice I see has to do with the relentless pursuit to control, wrangle, seek, carve out, or otherwise manage time.

Manage your energy, not your time. If you do that, time works itself out.

Smash your day…start with the clock

The new gurus suggest we should be waking up at 4am, undertaking elaborate morning routines, and twisting ourselves into intermittently-timed keto-friendly pretzels to tackle our to-dos in a 4-hour workday. As a result, people are literally exhausting themselves to make it all fit, getting more and more tired as they struggle.

What if we started responding more to the internal “I’m tired” signals over the external clock and calendar signals?

Here are small ways we can listen and respond to the things we actually need to be more productive.

Tiny actions to manage your energy

I’m always amazed how the smallest splinter at the tip of your finger can divert so much focus and can cause such suffering. And removing it brings about immense relief. That’s the power of small changes.

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Kim Witten, PhD

Helping overwhelmed creatives and small business owners make sense of things. Get unstuck every Thursday with Hold That Thought at www.witten.kim/subscribe