Technique: Keeping an Energy Diary

Keeping track of your energy, motivation and focus helps you to better understand your own patterns — and highlight any opportunities to redesign your working habits.

In a recent podcast conversation with Sabrina Bramble, she talked about getting the horrible stuff done first thing in the day, whilst your motivation and energy levels were high, I mentioned that I did the opposite and tried to keep the mornings free for creative tasks whilst I had the energy to focus — and it prompted me to think both about how useful structures can be when self-employed, but also how unique and individual they are, based upon your own preferences and working habits.

Structuring your days around energy requires knowing your energy

Structuring your day around your energy levels, your ability to focus, your motivation and drive to get things done is just one approach to actively designing a way of working that works for you — but without understanding what affects your energy and motivation, or how that changes over time, it can be frustrating.

Perhaps you start out with a plan, but when you don’t manage to stick to it, it can feel like you’ve failed — but perhaps your plan in the first place was only based upon your idea of what might be right, rather than how you’re actually feeling.

Keeping an energy diary is one way of collecting tangible data on your own working style, so you’re able to spot patterns over time. It’s not just about the time of day either — whilst the time of day have a significant impact on your energy levels (we all know the mid-afternoon slump), it’s also about the type of work you’re doing in that moment, or other things which might be influencing your motivation or energy.

How to keep an Energy Diary

In the morning, commit a page in your notebook, and throughout the day, jot down a score of how you’d say your energy levels are in that moment. Perhaps 1 for low, 2 for so-so and 3 for high.

Also take the time to write down what tasks or activities you’re undertaking. At the end of the day, note down any other factors you think might have had influence your energy level that day.

You don’t need to do anything with the diary entry just yet — but repeat the process over a few weeks each day, and then once you have a handful of pages built up (perhaps four weeks of the same day of the week, or two whole weeks), use 15 minutes to just take a look back.

Are there any patterns you spot? Do you on average feel low energy at any particular time of day or day of the week? Are there tasks which always seem to accompany high energy moments? Are there activities which seem to precede changes in your energy?

Don’t change your habits just yet

Techniques like this don’t require any changes from you — we’re not trying to encourage you to change your habits or re-structure your day, but they do give you information on what changes might be valuable, or where there are habits you might want to look deeper at.

In fact, we’d recommend you don’t make any changes until you’ve gathered a better insight on where things are working, and where they’re not. All too often good intentions, like new years resolutions, fail because you’re aiming at the wrong thing, or fixing things which aren’t broken — only leading to frustration. So figuring out where you’re starting from is valuable in the long term.

Downloadables

We’ve created a downloadable PDF version in case you want to print something out or an excel version if you want to work digitally.

You can of course just use a scrap of paper, or commit a notebook to creating an energy diary which you keep over time — and include other notes in, such as little wins and weekly reflections.

Originally published at https://www.leapers.co on September 26, 2020.