Manage Your Energy, Enable Your Productivity

This is the era of self-management. Most of us are aware of the benefits of managing our money. We’ve been focused on that for a while, perhaps even too focused at times. Many of us are preoccupied with managing our health and that’s probably a good thing. The principles for managing our time have been around for a while. While we may struggle with them, most of us know the basic principles and feel the impact of not using them consistently. (Do you plan your day, daily?)

So many things manage to drain our energy

Something that feels like it’s been added to the heap of all these things to manage is managing our energy. Energy has always been an issue for us, an important resource, but lately it feels like the pace of life is draining for many of us. If we don’t manage this drain we could end up brain dead or wiped out more often than we’d like.

There are many things that impact our energy, some relatively new. Technology has wonderful benefits, but email poorly managed, as an example can manage all the productivity, energy, and focus out of our day. It’s difficult, and so important, to get the most out of our energy—unless we manage this process, it will manage us.

Does your BlackBerry make you more productive?

I spoke with a friend of mine last night, a manager at a high tech hardware company. He was telling me how he no longer had a BlackBerry at work. His manager, perhaps for budget reasons, had taken back the team’s BlackBerry devices.

Never before did my friend have such peace. He was realizing how big a difference that BlackBerry, or rather its absence, made. How much it had been negatively impacting his productivity. There it was, going off and grabbing his attention, all day long. It buzzed in the meeting, at his desk, on the phone, at home, all over the place. It kept him constantly available and having to deal with others issues. And often these issues were not the most important issues in front of him.

There’s nothing wrong with mobile email, just like there’s nothing wrong with being available to other people who interrupt you– but if we don’t manage those things well, they will impact our productivity negatively. They will also impact our energy. Have you ever had a day where you felt forced or compelled to multitask as a survival mechanism? It’s a pretty draining day.

Technology, sleep, and commutes, oh my

Our energy seems to be under assault these days. When I ask seminar participants and clients what they wish they had more time for, the first answer, at least in 2007, is always “sleep.” Perhaps we’ve packed our lives to full? Maybe we feel ill-equipped to answer to the folks that want to continue packing our lives full for us?
Technology is great, but the instant availability afforded by technology means we spend more time communicating and being interrupted. And that leaves less time, focus and energy for everything else (including sleep), unless we manage the technology well.

Technology is one area you want to really look at in your life. How are you managing it? Most of us have systems for dealing with tech that are derived from our habits, not good design. It’s good to step back and redesign what we’re doing in these areas. Spending some time redesigning how you deal with say, your email inbox each day could be one of the best investments you make this year.

Commutes and traffic take their toll and can rob us of our energy. Our heavy workload and the number of things on our plate can get us into a state of mild panic. We may jump to rapid multitasking not because it makes sense given the tasks we’re switching between, but more because we feel we have to just to stay on top of things. This feeling can wipe us out and tank our energy.

Let me just restate my main point: to be productive we need time, but we also need focus and energy. Otherwise we work, but we don’t work very efficiently. Or we work, but we don’t really work at all—at least not on the things most need us that day.

Do you ever procrastinate? I do. It’s easy to procrastinate – all you need in order to put off a task is to feel that the task you’re trying to start on is bigger than you are. In other words, the task is bigger than how big you feel at the moment. And what effects how big you feel in relation to the tough task? Your energy does.

An experiment for you to try

Here’s an experiment I’d like you to try. I haven’t tried it yet (I promise to be honest with you when that’s the case), but it makes so much sense, I should have. In fact, I’m going to try it with you this week and I’ll get back to you about how it goes.

For the next five work days, track your energy (you want to see your patterns over the course of the week). Create a chart that has the hours of the day and a place to record how you feel that hour. Record on a 0-10 scale how much energy and focus you have that hour. Scoring that hour a “0” means you feel completely brain-dead with zero motivation. Scoring a “10” means you feel like you could take on any task on your list, completely focused, powerful, bursting with energy.

Consider leaving space on your chart to indicate any notes to yourself about that hour or what you learned. The objective of this exercise is to help you see what conflicts with your energy and to see what energy patterns you have in your day or week.

I once read that for most of us, our highest energy time occurs between 9 and 11 AM. There are many interesting studies that have been done around productivity during the day or the week. Where do you see your peak productivity time occurring?

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you look over your chart at the end of the week:

• When are my peak hours in a day? Is it the same time every day, or do I see a weekly pattern?
• What could I do to take advantage of the pattern?
• What tends to affect my focus and my energy level?
• What could I do to avoid or manage the things that drain me of energy?
• What are my first steps based on my answers and what I saw in the exercise?

Let me know how this experiment goes for you. I promise to share my results with you.