Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

Energy is defined as the capacity to do work. You need to balance the investment of time with the investment of energy. If I have your time right now as a reader, but you’re exhausted due to lack of sleep last night, the fact that I have your time, doesn’t necessarily mean that I have your attention or your energy.

If we don’t have the right fuel in our tanks, we are not going to be high performers in a sustainable way.

I discovered (or finally admitted to myself)? I have less energy than I have time every day!

That thought blew my mind and transformed how I worked. You really only have 3–4 hours a day when you are highly energized and sharply focused to create your best work. That’s it.

The trick isn’t how to extend that period of high energy, but how to make the best use of it.

Start by identifying what sustains you and what drains you.

Here are a few things I’ve learnt over the years about managing your energy:

1. Focus on what motivates you

Trying to be someone you are not is exhausting and drains your energy. The purpose of your work is the core of your personal energy. It compels you to take action. It replenishes and sustains the rest of your energy sources.

When you gain clarity about your ‘why’ in your work or life, you will feel a boost of energy. Your ‘why’ will also help sustain your momentum as you continue the long journey toward your purpose.

2. Create Habits

An article I recently read on HBR reported that your brain conserves valuable energy through the creation of habits. Approximately 40% of the actions you take every day are habits and require no thoughts.

If you want to design your life around the work you’ve always wanted to do, you might need to change some of your habits.

Yes, habits initially take energy to develop because you have to consciously think about developing them. Focused thought requires a lot of energy.

But once you establish a habit, it saves a lot of energy and time because those routines are now automatic, not requiring any thought.

Time management is about going through a “to do list” as fast as you can.

Energy management is about developing a core set of habits around your most important work.

Ever wonder why your “to-do lists” feels exhausting? It’s because each task becomes a decision, requiring energy. Habits have the potential to drastically reduce your “to-do list” and save your energy by turning common work tasks into habits.

3. Make fewer decisions.

As a business owner, I felt all I was doing was making dozens of small and large decisions daily. The more decisions Ihad to make, the more decision fatigue set in and saped my energy.

Decisions eat up a lot of time and energy because our brain has to focus on making a new choice.

Once I reduce the number of decisions I had to make through elimination, automation, and delegation, I was able to conserve my energy for important thinking and decisions like strategy and business development which is what motivates me.

4. Monotask, don’t multitask.

From an energy management perspective, a more productive method of working is “monotasking.” This means grouping related work tasks together.

Monotasking or working on one type of task at a time reduces the number of times your brain needs to switch between different connections, reducing the amount of energy required to get more work done.

You can even organize your schedule into “creator,” “mentor,” and “CEO” days to keep the different types of energy contained.

5. Close loops in your head

Is there something you’ve had on your mind for weeks, months, or maybe even years that you haven’t completed? Maybe the operations manual you never got around to creating or marketing templates that are pending. That’s what’s called an “open loop” — and it quietly drains a lot of energy out of you by taking up space in your subconscious.

Instead of wasting effort by having your brain remind you of that thing you haven’t done, take an hour, day, or week to close the loop and do that thing. This week I decided to stop letting the thought of marketing strategy sap my energy. I just took a day to do it. As soon as I built a marketing process, I immediately felt an entire world of creativity open up inside of me.

By Brindha Selvadurai