For Super Productivity, Manage Your Energy Not Your Time
We all know someone who is simultaneously relaxed and productive. Not only do they produce more work at a higher standard than anyone else, but they still seem to have time to relax on weekends, sleep 8 hours a day, and take yearly holidays. Yet, they only have 168 hours in their week, just like you. How do they do it?
In the last 20 years there has been an explosion on productivity, time tracking and ‘hacks’ to improve focus and output, and most of the content, from books to podcasts, websites and gadgets tend to focus on tracking just the measurables — the number of hours you are working, sleeping, standing, running etc. The Pomodoro technique has had us all tracing our work in chunks and using novelty timers to tell us to take breaks. Cal Newport has been on a campaign to get us to focus on one thing at a time, to increase our ability to do deep work. Laura Vanderkam has had us tracking every hour of our week in the quest to find out how we use and waste our time. And Gary Vaynerchuk has made it his personal mission to have us all hustling on weekends and posting on TikTok 5 times a day. While none of their advice is bad, it misses one piece of the puzzle — your energy.
Should we work more?
If you are planning on hustling 7 days a week or pulling 80 hour work weeks, then you are very quickly going to get burnt out. If you are younger, you might be able to ‘burn the candle on both ends’ in the short term, but sooner or later, exhaustion will get to you. Plus, working long hours, even if it is on a passion project, is not glamorous, nor does it constitute a life well lived. Elon Musk is perhaps one of the loudest voices when it comes to the quest of maximum output. In 2018 he tweeted that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”, going on to add that a good number of work hours is, “about 80 sustained, peaking above 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.” Yet the same year, Musk told The New York Times that he missed his own birthday, because he was working, “All night — no friends, nothing,” explained that he sleeps on the floor of his office most nights, and was taking insomnia drugs just to sleep.
Elon Musk’s work ethic has come under fire from many experts, and it even prompted Arianna Huffington to write an open letter to Musk, pointing out that “Tesla is revolutionary because it’s all about how we can most efficiently use energy, which holds the potential to change the world……….. But at the same time, you’re demonstrating a wildly outdated, anti-scientific and horribly inefficient way of using human energy. It’s like trying to launch us into our clean energy future (or into space) with a coal-fired steam engine. It just won’t work.”
“This is not about working hard — of course you’re always going to work hard. It’s about working in a way that allows you to make your best decisions.” — Arianna Huffington
Should we work less?
Despite the hype around working long hours, hustling and grinding, working less may actually be the key to increasing productivity and focus. One study from New Zealand found that cutting back to a 4 day work week (around 30 hours) resulted in a 20% rise in productivity, and it also appears to have helped increase profits and improved staff wellbeing, with staff stress levels down from 45% to 38% and work-life balance scores up from 54% to 78%. Employers in Sweden tested 6 hour workdays, leaving staff saying they felt happier and less tired, with companies experiencing a lower turnover rate and an increase in profits during the experiment.
Researchers are still trying to find out why we are seeing these results. Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion” and so it may be that by reducing our work hours, we are able to focus on doing the most important things, reducing the amount of time wasted. Another reason is that less time spent working can lead to more time spent learning, exercising and sleeping — all things known to boost mental energy. Even sleeping one extra hour per day can benefit our focus and mental well being, and studies have shown that After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Sleeping less than 7 hours results in us becoming physically exhausted sooner, lowers our oxygen intake, lowers our peak muscle strength, and lowers our peak running speed. So sleep helps replenish our bodies and makes us stronger physically and mentally.
It seems that contrary to popular belief, working more doesn’t bring better results, but if we are working less, how do we then increase productivity and focus? The answer isn’t in focusing on our time, rather it’s in our energy.
Manage your Energy
Back in 2007, Harvard Business Review published an article by the same name as this one, Manage Your Time, Not Your Energy. In it, Tony Schwartz (author of The Power of Full Engagement) and Catherine McCarthy argue that people take for granted the energy that fuels their capacity to work, and that while time is a finite resource, energy isn’t. Through understanding how to harness and renew our energy, we can gain more focus, more productivity, and ultimately more time back for ourselves.
Schwartz suggests we look at our energy in four different quadrants: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit, and each part requires different activities to replenish reserves. For example, to keep the body in peak condition requires good quality nutrition, adequate exercise, deep sleep, and periods of rest. When these are met, it increases a person’s ability to focus, reduces stress, and helps regulate emotions. In terms of the mental energy of the mind, by minimising distractions energy can be better directed at focusing on difficult problems, or doing chunks of work (similar to Cal Newport’s deep work theory).
Schwartz’s other two areas of energy are rarely discussed in the productivity genre — emotions and spirit — but he makes the case for them being just as important as the body and the mind. Not many people pay attention to their emotional state as they do their physical state, but this can actually reduce our productivity, our problem thinking and our overall results both at work and in our personal lives. When you are optimistic it is easier to deal with challenges and surprises compared to being in a negative state. People waste a lot of energy if they are not enjoying what they are doing, as everything seems like an uphill battle and the energy expenditure just to get into the mental headspace to work is huge. Even naturally optimistic people can get drained if they don’t take the time to replenish their energy, and so building in small moments into one’s day to ‘stop and smell the roses’ can work wonders for emotions. A 5 minute meditation or journaling thoughts can also help, as well as a quick walk around the block or deep breathing. Anything that relaxes you and changes your state of mind for a moment.
“Most people realize that they tend to perform best when they’re feeling positive energy. What they find surprising is that they’re not able to perform well or to lead effectively when they’re feeling any other way.”
The final energy, spirit, is perhaps the one that can energise us the most. If you are doing work that has a purpose, that matters to you and aligns to your values, then you are sure to gain more energy out of it than if you are just working for a paycheck. It is this part of the energy quadrant that Musk has mastered, and he demonstrates better than anyone that purpose can fuel perseverance. While not all of us drive deep satisfaction from our day jobs, it is important to find time in one’s life to tap into our spirit, by doing things we love, helping others and working in a way that aligns with our values. This is perhaps the hardest energy to cultivate as it might require changing some aspects of your life, but if you tap into it, you will gain more energy and better output than ever before.
On top of the four quadrants of energy to master, we also need to make time for rest and recovery — just like an athlete. This is perhaps why shorter workdays and work weeks have proven to bring better work results because time spent not working can instead be spent on replenishing our energy stores. Instead of focusing solely on the outer game of productivity and results, perhaps it’s time to focus on the inner game of energy, purpose and rest. After all, we are not robots, but complex emotional and creative beings, and if we focus on what brings us the most energy, we will increase our chances to excel over longer periods of time.
