Energy Management

Am I lazy or what?

I don’t know if this is some kind of coming out or something like that. If I’m being honest, I have to say that I am not 100% productive every hour or minute of my work. And I am not even 100% productive 80% of the time. And I love my job. I’m genuinely curious and I’m inspired by the impact we’re making here. Still, my productivity is not 100%.

We can blame many factors. The fact that it’s the end of the 2nd year of covid, and we are again back to working fully from home, for a month already. So you can imagine sitting in the same chair inside the same 4 walls. Every day looks the same. Sometimes I’m not going outside several days in a row. Running helps, though. Rains really mess up the schedule or my runs, though. Why are they so cold?

Zoom calls all day long, struggling to focus. Everyone has kids in the background, occasionally family members come into the room to ask something. The whole meeting pauses for half a minute. Everyone understands. And we are here together in this fight for our focus and attention. Okay, everyone, together, let’s make another push. Okay, we’re focused, we are ready. Let’s continue the call.

Of course, these factors count. But I think another important factor is something that I call energy management. Probably it’s even studied by smart people and they have a better term. I found out that when you’re doing creative work, you need to be smart about your efforts. By creative work I mean not necessarily art & design. Writing code is creative, analyzing data is creative, planning a project is creative. You name it. Sometimes in 1 hour of high focus (or the flow, that’s how it’s called, right?) you can do more than in 5 hours of medium focus. Sometimes you’re doing something else and you get an idea about your next step in the problem you’re solving. Sometimes you just need to do it, though. Just sit down and do it. So one of the skills we need to master is energy management.

We need to know when to push it and when to slow down. When to concentrate for 2 hours and when to be in meetings. Ever found yourself in a situation when you try to squeeze some quality work in a 30 minutes window between meetings, and then you feel frustrated and unproductive when you didn’t achieve anything? No wonders, it takes us 15–20 minutes just to refocus. So maybe that’s the time to go to the restroom and make some tea. Hug your child. Hug your cat. Answer some emails and slack messages.

We need to plan our focus time. I use MMI meetings. It’s a blocked time in my calendar for a wonderful trio — Me, Myself and I. And don’t always be frustrated by not hitting this 100% of productivity.

Anyway, let me know if you also experience this and what are your tips on how to manage your energy!