A Note on Personal Energy

Time management and its Shortfalls

Time management is one of the most contentious topics in business. Regardless of the industry, the scale and complexity, or whether the work involves just an individual or an entire team, people generally only want to know how long it will take, and by extension, how much it will cost. It's because of this that we over-fixate on time management and let it control our personal lives too. So many times I've said to myself: "I need to get X done by this day" or "I only have X hours left to finish this.". I think the issue with this mentality is that consistency is difficult. You're not always able to perform at 100% and that's okay, but it needs to be factored into your execution. It’s hard to admit that a task you breezed through last week now feels like a slog — simply because you’re not at full energy, but that’s the reality, and ignoring it leads to misaligned expectations.

Energy Management

An alternate approach is to manage tasks around your personal energy levels instead. When planning your day or week, try to think about where your energy levels are. If you're feeling strong and energised you can probably get more focus blocks in that day or week than usual. Think about the last time you were working on something and you were fully in the zone. Did you stop after your usual work day was up? I know I don't. I keep riding that wave until the task is done or I eventually break out of focus. On the other hand, when you're not feeling up to it, do you stay at your workstation for the duration of your usual work day? Why? If you've already checked-out mentally then trying to push through in that condition is a waste in my opinion. The work you do when you're low on energy is also of a much lower quality compared to when you're reasonably energised.

There is a counter argument for this that says anything worth doing is worth doing poorly - meaning that even in a low energy state you can still make incremental progress which is still progress. I think this depends on the situation. For example, if you've put off exercise for a whole week and you usually do 100 push ups every other day, then just do 10 push ups, or even just one single push up is better than nothing. However, if you did too many push ups the week before and you've strained your upper body then you probably shouldn't do any push ups at all. I find work where you're completing a set list of simple tasks can benefit more from 'low energy progress', but again this is still less progress than you would get if you worked on those same tasks in a high energy mode.

I think the main benefit of energy management is that it ensures consistency in the quality of your output, meaning you're doing good work and making good decisions more of the time. This in turn leads to time pressure being less of a concern, which ideally leads to having more time to recharge, giving you compounding benefits.

In Practice

Personal productivity is quite subjective and thus there are a lot of different frameworks for energy management, and different ways of applying those frameworks and so on, which is way too much to cover here. I think the core idea can be condensed into:

Do your most difficult and challenging tasks when you're the most capable.

By this I definitely do not mean the popular internet advice which says to do all your hardest tasks first thing in the morning. If like me, you're not a morning person then that will be pretty gruelling too. Everyone has a specific time of day, or multiple times in the day when they feel most energised and this is the time you should plan around. You can adjust this period by forcing yourself into a new routine if you need to. Your body can effectively adapt to any routine, it just takes more effort for routines that are far from where you currently are. So I would only recommend doing this if absolutely necessary.

One thing I would recommend however, is using energising tasks to your advantage. Those are things you might do during a break for a few minutes, which seem to give you more energy to go back into a productive task. For me that's usually a bit of gaming, but it could be any mentally engaging activity.

Final Thoughts

Shifting your mindset from time management to energy management isn't about doing less in the time available, it's about doing better. It's about recognising that your sharpest thinking, your clearest problem-solving, and your most creative output all come when you're feeling your most energised. And when you unlock that high quality output you can get back the time you were rigidly rationing before.