Four Ways to Manage Your Energy More Effectively
By Elizabeth Grace Saunders
Almost anyone can muster enough gumption for a short burst of high-energy effort. Maybe it’s making a shining impression your first few weeks on a job, hitting the gym with fervor at the start of January, or spending a weekend on a remodeling project exhibiting all the peppiness of an HGTV star.
But what about after that initial burst? Do you still feel the same a few months or even a year into your new job, goal, or project? Have you abandoned your ambitions? Do you continue to push on while fighting signs of fatigue or burnout? Or do you wildly vacillate between hyperproductivity and getting nothing done?
The key to success at work and in life isn’t really starting strong; it’s staying strong. And one of the keys to having that staying power is the idea of self-regulation. This entails operating within lower and upper boundaries of activity by predetermining the minimum and maximum amount of action you will take toward a specific goal within a certain span of time (such as a day or a week). This keeps you from getting derailed because you dropped off or lost interest, or overdoing it and finding yourself too exhausted to continue.
As a time management coach, I’ve seen that there are four steps to creating this staying power. When you follow these steps, you’ll be surprised to find that you’ll accomplish more of your goals with less effort—and give yourself drive that lasts.
Set Upper and Lower Boundaries
The idea of goal setting is popular, especially at the start of the year. But not many individuals take the time to write out the steps that they will take to achieve their goals. And in my estimation, many fewer take the time to define their daily upper and lower boundaries for each of their goals.
In Greg McKeown’s book Effortless, he suggests the idea of making concrete boundaries for both how little and how much you will do in a given day on your important priorities—for instance, for hitting sales numbers, you may determine to never make fewer than five sales calls in a day and never more than 10 sales calls in a day.
You can extend this into any project or goal that you want to accomplish. For example, if you want to author a book, you might decide to write no less than 30 minutes per day and no more than three hours per day to avoid burning out. Or for exercise, you may decide to work out no less than three times per week and no more than five times per week, so you get a sufficient workout in and also have time for your other priorities like spending time with your family or personal tasks. (For more on investing your time and energy, see the sidebar “Invest Your Energy.”)
These boundaries give you some wiggle room but also give you the ability to stay on track over time. When you’re setting your own upper and lower limits, think through what’s the least you could do in a particular area to feel like you are keeping up your momentum. The goal on the low end is to not feel like you “stopped” and need to exert extra effort to break the inertia and restart. And when you’re defining your upper limits, think about where you need to limit yourself so that your investment in this particular area doesn’t take so much of your time that other areas of your life suffer.
By Peter Bregman
We all know what it takes to build and maintain our energy: sleep well, eat right, exercise, and so on. But how often do you think about how strategically you use the energy you have?
The answer for me: not very.
When I’m in a conversation, I almost always share my thoughts. In fact, if I am near a conversation, I often share my thoughts. I involve myself in decisions that others could make just as well or better. And when I am making decisions, I often delay them, struggling to make them perfect even when there are no right answers.
Those are just my visible energy-spending patterns. There’s a whole category of invisible ones that sap my energy even more, such as holding on to frustrations and hurts well past their due date and worrying about the outcome of things over which I have no control.
Once I started to pay attention, I began to see how carelessly—how indiscriminately—I spend my energy.
When I invest my energy, I spend it writing, listening, strategizing, teaching, thinking, planning, offering my opinion selectively and with an outcome in mind, and making decisions swiftly.
It’s not simply about productivity. I happily invest my energy in ways that simply bring me joy: my children, reading, interesting conversations with friends, and learning new things for fun, to name a few.
The important thing is to be intentional about where we put our energy so that we apply it to what matters most to us. Here’s how:
1.Notice your energy. Where do you spend it? I set my phone to beep at random times during the day as a prompt to notice how I’m spending my energy at that moment—both visibly (doing) and invisibly (thinking). When you look at life with an energy lens, you begin to see things differently. Simply doing this little energy check-in began to change my habits.
2.Know what matters to you. Knowing what brings value to your life—joy and productivity, for me—is essential to making smart decisions about where to invest your energy.
3.Plan wise energy investment. Once you know which things matter most to you, schedule as many of them into your life as possible. Put them in your calendar. Let them crowd out activities that represent energy leaks. This idea of “crowding out” works for thinking, too. Where do you want to invest your mental energy? I find that perseverating over things (or people) that annoy me is almost never a useful way to spend energy. But thinking about what I can learn from something almost always is. Let your learning mind crowd out your complaining mind.
4.Most importantly, plan where not to invest your energy. Once you begin to notice your energy, you will clearly see things you do and ways you think that are pointless energy drains. While it’s surprisingly hard to stop doing something midstream, it’s much less painful to not start in the first place. Think of how much easier it is not to turn on the television than to stop watching in the middle of a show.
Don’t enter a conversation that you know will rile you up and get you nowhere.
5.Don’t spend much time thinking about it. Optimizing your energy expenditure can become its own counterproductive energy drain. You don’t have to get it right, just better than yesterday. Simply pull yourself out of one useless conversation, stop yourself from responding to one silly email, let go of one nagging thought, and you’ll be a more intelligent investor of your energy.
Sometimes the solution to a problem isn’t to do more. It’s to do less.
Peter Bregman is the CEO of Bregman Partners, an executive coaching company that helps successful people become exceptional leaders and stellar human beings. The bestselling author of 18 Minutes and Leading with Emotional Courage, his most recent book is You Can Change Other People.
Excerpted from “5 Steps to Investing Your Energy More Wisely,” on hbr.org, March 8, 2016 (product #H02PK1).
When facing a goal, do you tend to get into a high-drive gear and try to remain there 24/7? Do you operate at a low-drive level most of the time, often having to scurry to the finish line at the last minute? Do you find yourself vacillating between extremes where one day you compulsively work until the wee hours of the night, and the next day you crash and do next to nothing?
Depending on your tendency, you can proceed in one of the following three ways:
- For those in the first, high-drive category, you’ll need to give yourself permission to be human, to rest, and to have real downtime. Keep a close eye on whether you’re going over your upper boundary of activity and headed for burnout.
- For those in the second, low-drive category, keep a close eye on whether or not you’re staying above your lower bound. You want to ensure that you’re doing at least the minimum before chilling out (as tempting as that may seem).
- For those in the third, fluctuating-drive category, you’ll need to keep an eye on both bounds. Avoiding going over your upper bound should prevent you from falling below your lower bound the next day.
As McKeown wisely writes in his book, “Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.”
Build In Rest and Recovery
As humans, we’re designed for cycles of activity and rest. That’s why we sleep at night, why weekends are an essential part of a productive workweek, and why even elite athletes can’t work out every waking hour.
If you’re a high-drive individual, you’ll need to remain especially conscious about giving yourself planned times of rest and recovery. Since I fall toward this tendency, I make sure that my personal time isn’t as jam-packed as my work time. For me, that means viewing my nonwork time not only as time to complete personal tasks, but also as time for rest. For instance, two mornings a week I don’t do my normal 5:15 a.m. wakeup for swimming. Instead, I give myself time to contemplate life, read interesting articles, or simply sleep in. I also consciously take time on the weekends and evenings to connect with people without a time limit—just going with the flow and allowing things to take as long as they take.
If you operate at a low-drive level, make sure you’ve at least hit your lower boundary of activity before taking a break. That means that you can still take ample breaks, but only after you’ve made progress on a goal.
And if your drive fluctuates, you’ll need to remember to have rest and recovery on the days when you feel on top of the world and like you can work 24/7 so that you don’t crash the next day. That could include the basics like taking time to eat, moving from your chair by stretching or walking, and not staying up crazy late—no matter how energized you feel. Force yourself to stop when it’s a reasonable time for you to go to bed so that you can begin again fresh the next day.
Give Yourself Breathing Room
To have staying power, you need to keep your work within sustainable boundaries—and you need to work at a sustainable pace. There are days when back-to-back meetings are necessary or when you need to go from task to task to task. But for most people, this strategy doesn’t have long-term viability.
I encourage you, if at all possible, to have at least a few hours in a day or week where you’re not in meetings. And even better, if you can block out larger chunks of time for accomplishing bigger projects, you can give yourself permission to really be immersed in the work without the pressure of a tight time window. For me, I accomplish this goal by taking Wednesday as a day free of coaching calls. That allows me to get specific projects done, such as writing this article. My whole Wednesday is blocked on a recurring basis as “Project Day” so that no one can schedule meetings with me. And I find that if you can work from home or in a private spot on days when you want to do more deep work, then it’s usually easier to do so without getting interrupted.
Life isn’t a sprint. It’s an ongoing journey. And to stay high-performing, healthy, and happy both inside and outside of work, you need to have staying power. Look closely at how you work and follow these tips to ensure that you’re working effectively, productively, and within your bounds.
ELIZABETH GRACE SAUNDERS is a time management coach and the founder of Real Life E Time Coaching & Speaking. She is the author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money and Divine Time Management. Find out more at www.RealLifeE.com.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, May 14, 2021 (product #H06CNV).