Conserving Your Energy
Assess projects so you can spread out your energy over the week.
I ran across this HBR article on managing your energy not your time. On the face of it, sounds great. It suggests a lot of common sense strategies (they repackage as "energy management" 🙃) to manage your energy on the job. They are good – things like eating better, exercising or getting more sleep. Not responding to every notification and ping immediately. However, the overall tone asks the employee to expend their personal time and energy outside the job in order to maximize their energy on the job.
I wrote about time vs effort (energy) a while back:
I also want to make a distinction between effort and time. I’m currently creating a calendar for a client. Updating all the monthly calendar pages takes some time. But not a ton of effort. It’s not so much a heavy design lift as it is a technical exercise. Conversely, sometimes I need to come up with ideas quickly. These times are high effort, even though I may not have a ton of actual time to spend. Time is a concrete thing, but effort can vary.
Assess a project at the outset and decide if it is a high or low energy project. This doesn't mean you won't do an excellent job at it, but not every project requires high energy. If you do this, you can spread out your energy in a more effective way over the course of your day or week. Remember the Law of Conservation of Energy: "a principle in physics that states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and that the total energy of a system by itself remains constant." Use your energy wisely.
More Time Resources:
K. Nicole Stowe
K. Nicole Stowe
K. Nicole Stowe