🔋 Energy Management > Time Management
I recently had someone in a leadership role at their company commisserate with me about being overwhelmed by your to-do list and having your body just go,“Actually? No.”
A color-coded calendar isn’t going to save you. You are not short on time. You are short on energy.
And unless you build habits that protect your energy instead of draining it, you’ll forever feel like you’re on a hamster wheel with no way to get out.
Time is predictable. Energy is not.
You wake up with a certain amount, spend it all day, and then ideally recharge. But that doesn’t work if you burn half of it doomscrolling or doing things that aren’t moving you forward.
Energy management is the difference between maintaining momentum and feeling like you’re stuck in buffering mode with too many decisions in front of you. It can mean the difference between progress and complete overwhelm.
Minimum Viable Morning
You don’t need a 9-step ritual or to wake up at 5am to have your morning set you up for success. You just need one thing that moves your day forward.
Examples:
Put away last night’s dishes
Drink water before caffeine
Start a journaling practice
Complete one tiny task you enjoy that’s not otherwise an obligation
Spend a few minutes preparing a good breakfast
Your Minimum Viable Morning is about momentum, not perfection. It tells your brain, “Hey, we’re doing things today,” before other obligations kick in.
Work with your energy cycles (not against them)
There are times of the day where you’re a genius and other times of the day you’re basically a potato.
Here’s the rule: Do high-energy tasks during high-energy hours. Do everything else later.
If you’re a morning person, front-load your day. If you tend to have more energy in the evenings, don’t try to get work done when you’re typically groggy.
If it’s not obvious when your energy kicks in, try tracking it for three days. When you’re clear, when you’re foggy, when everything annoys you. If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get moving sometimes, this could solve a lot.
Protect your high-value energy like it’s expensive
There are two types of energy: Creative Energy and Administrative Energy. One is for strategy, decision-making, writing, and creating - what some folks call Deep Work. The other is for life admin, replying to emails, monotonous stuff.
Try giving your best energy time to the most important creative thing. Your biggest priority. Protect your high energy time like the valuable resource it is.
Create friction for bad habits + remove friction for good ones
Make the bad habits annoying:
Log out of apps you check out of habit or move them to a page you don’t visit
Put your phone in another room
Change your notification settings for things like Slack or Email to disable when you want to be offline
Make the good habits easier:
Leave your water bottle in front of your laptop
Put your workout clothes on the chair where you can’t ignore them
Keep your most important doc pinned or bookmarked
Leave your project materials ready to go on your desk before you go to sleep
No amount of time blocking or perfect scheduling will complete a task if you’re running on empty, distracted, or suffering from decision fatigue.
When you can manage your energy and direct it at the most critical items, it gets easier to keep moving forward, and the never ending to-do list can look less daunting.
Want this in your inbox? Subscribe to TODAY TODAY for weekly emails.