We typically look at time management in order to measure how productive we are. We time ourselves, make to-do lists and care for everything else first before we care for ourselves. We end up making ourselves feel guilty when we haven’t ticked off all of these things. It’s time to change that and work towards completing our daily goals by focusing on energy management instead.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where we glorify overworking and believe the prospect of doing more means being better. We may love the paycheck at the end of the month but what price do we pay for that?

Thinking this way makes your worth become tied to how busy you are and you value your productivity by the number of things you’ve achieved throughout the day and not the size of the achievement. 

As humans, we’re too impatient. We want things to come to us quickly instead of slowing down and focusing on the journey. We want to jump straight to the end goal and live life beyond it, fast forwarding to the good bits without experiencing the real story. 

We’re also programmed to believe that working harder will bring us quicker to our most wanted desires. And we’re not really taught how to handle setbacks or barriers in time so we end up thinking that we must use every second to work work work. 

Between all of that productivity and focus, we may end up neglecting other parts of our lives such as self care. We get bogged down with ticking things off our lists and ignore the needs of our minds and bodies, despite the warning signs that scream out to us. 

We think that there are too many things to do so we put self care at the bottom of our priorities. This is probably because we don’t see the real value of self care and believe there are better things we can be doing with our time. 

We end up trading too much of our time to feed into all the other parts of our lives and mistakenly leave barely enough time to be able to wind down and care for ourselves. 

But at the end of the day, we are humans who have needs. We are responsible for caring for ourselves and we must prioritise the things we need to be able to function better. 

To do this, we can migrate to planning our lives around energy management.

Energy Management

Energy management is the practise of designing your day based on the way you feel and the energy trends that your body has. You manage your to-do list by how each activity brings you up or drains you and place them strategically at certain points in your day to get the best outcome and feel good about it.

Everyone works differently throughout the day. You might function better in the mornings and begin to lag in the afternoon. In this case you may want to do something that boosts you when you start to feel that afternoon dip to bring yourself back up to a good energy level. 

Continue to increase the positive things that make you feel really good and provide you with positive outcomes. Remove the things that don’t bring great value to your life or move them in your schedule to a time where you know you can power through it. 

Essentially, energy management is about forgetting your time schedule and choosing when to focus on different tasks depending on how you feel before, during and after it. 

This also means that you can choose to tackle your tasks at the optimum time in the day or week. 

 

Why Must We Focus On Our Energy? 

I don’t know about you, but if I don’t have the energy to do something, then I’m either not going to do it or do a very bad job of it. Because I don’t have the energy to be able to complete it.

The more I’ve tried to force myself to do things, the more my body and mind pushes back and moans at me for doing something that I simply just don’t want to do. 

I’ve burned myself out so many times trying to please others, increase the money going into my account and spending time working on things that don’t bring enough value to my life. 

And I used to think this was because my time management was bad – that I had a bad schedule or I was just lazy. But actually, I just needed to discover energy management. 

I’ve adapted this way of scheduling into my everyday routine and although I still have a significantly long to-do list, I no longer feel the need to tick everything off my list. 

I base my workload goal for the day on how tired I am, what else I’ve got going on and how all of these things are going to affect my physical and mental energy. 

Organising my life based on my energy helps me to prevent any burn outs and familiarise myself with where my work limits are. 

Energy management can be useful for those people who don’t benefit from a typical 9-5 work pattern. 

Some people function better with an early start and don’t mind the 5am commute. Others need a bit of a lie in or take an hour to fully wake up. 

We all function differently, which is something that a typical 9-5 job isn’t flexible enough with. Working on an adaptable time schedule can help you to use energy management that extra bit better. 

Even if you can’t, there are still ways you can use energy management in your pattern. Identify your energy habits and work with them instead of fighting against them.

Energy management can help us to produce our best work possible. If we schedule things throughout the day based on when we are going to have the best energy level for that particular task, it’s going to help us complete it as successfully as we can. 

If we spend too much time focusing on something that is exhausting us when we’re already feeling like we’re on low battery mode, then we’re only going to end up more tired, working even slower and wasting our own time. Don’t give more than you’ve got in you. A phone doesn’t continue to stay on when it’s lost its charge.

 

Focusing on energy management helps us to identify when our bodies and minds are crying out for some self love and when we need to wind down and focus on our own needs and not what our jobs/families/lives are demanding from us. 

And strangely, you may actually save more time by focusing on your energy management instead. If you target your bigger tasks at a time where you’re feeling good and ready to tackle them, you will probably complete them in a shorter time space than if you’d forced yourself to do it at a time when you felt really tired. 

You’ll end up much happier, with less pressure and guilt following you at the end of the day. You’ll know that you’ve progressed through the day, working on the things that you knew you had the energy for, instead of punishing yourself and feeling like a failure for ticking off less than expected. 

At the end of the day, if you don’t have the capacity to do something, then it’s impossible to complete. 

Look at your calendar right now and notice how full it is. Do you genuinely have enough time for yourself, to top up your energy levels and do something purely for yourself?

It’s not a crime to listen to your body’s needs. If it’s screaming out for a bit of love, give it love, top it up and give yourself the capacity to tackle your goals later. 

 

My problem has always been mistaking free time for availability. 

I give way too much of my free time away because I don’t like to say no to people without giving them a solid reason. Most of my friends are pretty good. I’m very honest with them and tell them when I need a little down time and instead of going for a drink or having a catch up, I’m going to lie in bed or watch a film. They recognise that everyone needs that time to themselves, but a lot of other people don’t! 

Don’t feel like you have to use up all of your free time because you’re only going to burn yourself out trying to be everywhere all the time and do everything at once. Sometimes your life gets busy, but you’re allowed to say ‘no’ or ‘later’ and enjoy some time for yourself to refill your energy. 

 

And don’t mistake relaxation for laziness. A lot of people will see this as you  thinking ‘oh, I don’t have the energy to do this so I’ll do something easier’. It’s not about choosing something easier. It’s about identifying what brings you up so that you can continue your day feeling full of life and motivation rather than bogged down with all the heavier tasks hanging around your shoulders.

It will help you to manage your stress levels and feel like you’re more in control of your emotions by manipulating your schedule. You’re proritising your needs, following your intuition, listening to your body and creating a centered and purposeful life!

 

How To Energy Audit

To begin your routine transformation from time management to energy management you can go about your normal life but keep track of your day. 

Record everything you do and the time you do them, no matter how small it is. 

Make a note of how your energy went up or down and how each activity made you feel.  

As you continue to do this, you’ll be able to piece together your typical energy pattern, what causes your energy to drop and what picks you up. 

Each day will look different depending on what you’ve been up to, but the main thing is that you can identify your typical daily trend and what affects your energy levels. 

You can draw it on a graph if it would help you to visually see it. 

After a couple of weeks or so, you will soon be able to identify what regular habits take energy from you and the cues that trigger them. This will help you to respond to them in a beneficial way in the future. You can manipulate them and position them in your schedule at a time where your energy is high or remove them completely if you aren’t gaining anything from them. 

This can be great for your workload as you can invest your energy into the more rewarding tasks and tackle the hardest ones when you feel your best.

It’s important to remember that the daily cycle isn’t the only one to audit. 

Your energy levels can fluctuate through different times of your life. For women, we have to take more notice of our monthly cycle and how our periods and hormones affect the way we work. For those with depression, we need to adapt to the seasons as autumn and winter can play a part in our health and productivity. 

It’s important to keep measuring our energy levels continuously for us to gauge how our brain works, not only on a daily basis, but depending on the seasons and our changes in lifestyle. 

I would recommend doing an audit every three months as the seasons change, but as you’re starting out monitor the next few months to see how your periods affect you too.

 

Energy In, Energy Out

I used to measure my success and productivity by counting how many things I’d accomplished in a certain amount of time. 

In my head, I assumed that I was able to do everything I added to my daily list without any excuses because I had so much time to do all of these things. 

On paper, yeah, I guess I could. But that would mean I would be ignoring everything else around me. And more specifically, I’d be ignoring what my mind and body needs. 

Really, it all comes down to the fact that we cannot give energy if we don’t already have some. 

I like to think of self care as being productive as I’m filling myself up with the energy I need to take on the world. By pursuing and making time for self care, we’re readying ourselves with the motivation and ability to take on the things that require energy. 

An athlete sets themselves up for a big race by eating a carb filled diet and getting into a good headspace. 

We can do exactly the same by topping up our own energy levels with the things we love to do. 

 

So a big question for you: What picks you up and gives you an energy boost?

Here’s some of mine: Sleep, fun, food, pampering, reading, light exercise, writing, caring for my plants, skincare, socialising. 

And what parts of my life demand energy?

Intense exercise, housework, too much socialising, working, projects, building Minds of Jupiter. Anything else on my to-do list!

I’m grateful that some of the things that require my energy also fill me with a level of satisfaction too. It makes it all worth doing in the end. 

So please, take a minute to think about how you re-energise, refill and replenish. What brings you energy, satisfaction and readiness? 

And then schedule it in your calendar.. And never cancel on yourself! 

 

Rebuild Your Schedule

Okay, now that you know what brings your energy up and down, it’s time to rebuild your schedule with your energy in mind to improve your productivity levels. 

Boost yourself wherever you can by following a draining task with something from your ‘energy in’ list to lift yourself up again afterwards. 

The more you do it, the more effective it becomes as you gain new habits and a new routine dependent on your energy levels whilst still being productive. 

You’ll be able to maximise your time and work at a time where it flows much more efficiently.

Energy means progress! 

The part of our brain that controls motivation (called the striatum) has an increased response when we know we’ve got a choice to do something. The way that energy management works is that we have a choice in whether we do something now or later. When we’ve got a choice, we have more motivation to get it done, have increased confidence levels, the will to work harder and to over comeback setbacks. Bonus!

 

As we’re rebuilding our schedule, we must focus on the things we can control – which is our energy and not the time. 

Instead of scheduling a task from 9am til 10am, give yourself a little more flexibility and note down ‘morning’ or ‘first thing’. 

Remember to schedule in your ‘energy in’ activities! 

These are the things that are going to replenish your energy throughout the day. They’ll help us to fill ourselves up when we’re having dips and should assist with de-stressing us, feeling good and keeping us motivated. 

 

Keeping Your Schedule Flexible

Flexibility in your schedule is a MUST. Energy management is all about listening to our bodies and when it’s telling us to take it easy. 

You can take a break, rest and come back when your energy levels are higher. 

As mentioned in the energy audit, it’s important to note down how other aspects of life can interfere with your energy levels and productivity. 

Things like the seasons will make a difference. We typically have more energy in the summer, where the sun shines for longer periods of time, there are longer days and we have more motivation to do things. 

We may worry about the winter months approaching as we know how awful they can be for our energy levels. But we can still control this and use more of our ‘energy in’ activities to boost us more.

 

The normal shifts and changes of life is something we never take into account. The ups and downs of life can have severe impacts on our energy but we’re usually taught to ‘power through’ and get on with it. 

Instead, you need to factor this in. 

Have you just had a baby? Of course your energy is low!

Maybe you’ve moved house? A lot of your energy and time will be spent on moving in and decorating. 

Have you broken up with a long-term partner? You’re getting used to life without them and probably feeling miserable. 

It’s no surprise that the events of life sucks the life out of us. So remember that when you’re having bad days and wondering why you don’t feel as energetic as you usually would. 

 

Your menstrual cycle can also drain your energy. Your womb is literally shredding itself and with that comes cramps and pain. Usually unhealthy food cravings then come in which don’t help us boost our energy. Take this all into account if you’re doing a monthly audit. 

All of these demand different outputs – we can’t help that! – but we can try to keep topping ourselves up with energy in order for us to keep our energy levels balanced.

 

Well, I know that was a lot of information to take in, but wow is it effective! Give energy management a trial run and see if your new routine makes you happier, more able to balance your life and more motivated to get those tasks completed!