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Energy Management v. Time Management

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Think In Terms of Energy Management Instead of Time Management

Tony Shwartz and Jim Loehr explain in their book "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal" that in order to be more effective throughout the day you need to start thinking about your energy instead of your time.

Time is finite.  However, this is the resource we most often turn to in order to meet the demands of life.  For example, if your workload increases, you put in more hours. However, there comes a point where you can't put in more hours because there simply aren't any more hours in a day.

The key, then, is to get more done in less time.  The way you do this is to go after a different resource, and that resource is energy.  Energy can be systematically expanded and it can be regularly renewed.

Energy is your capacity to do work.  If you build the reservoir of energy that you have available to you--that is, if you can put more fuel in your tank--, then you'll have increased capacity.

This lens will show you how to manage your energy so that you can get more done in less time.

Important!

You raise your energy level by sleeping well at night, eating the right foods, getting exercise, fostering the right emotional states, focusing your attention, having a high level of commitment, taking breaks, and so on.

The Power of Full Engagement

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

by: Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz

Amazon Price: $7.68 (as of 05/31/2012)Buy Now

Managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal. The book explains how to increase your energy levels by tapping four primary sources of energy: physical (the books includes tips on exercise, nutrition, and sleep); emotional ("transforming threat into challenge"); mental ("appropriate focus and realistic optimism"); and spiritual ("having a 'why' to live").

The book also explains how to set up routines that can transform your life.

One of the co-authors of the book is Tony Schwartz, founder and CEO of The Energy Project, which is all about learning how to manage your energy instead of your time to achieve optimal performance at work, at home, and everywhere else.

Energy Tip #1

Break your workday into 90-minute "sprints," punctuated by 15-minute breaks which serve to re-energize and re-vitalize your efforts.

Four Sources of Energy

We need four sources of energy in order to be able to perform at our best: physical energy, spiritual energy, emotional energy, and mental energy.

Physical Energy

Physical capacity is the foundation on which everything else rests. If you don't have enough physical energy it's going to influence your focus of attention, your ability to manage your emotions under pressure, and so on. Physical energy is about the quantity of energy that you have available to you.

Physical capacity has four components:

1. Nutrition
2. Fitness
3. Sleep
4. Recovery or Renewal (daytime equivalent of sleep)

Emotional Energy

This is about how you feel, which dramatically influences how well you perform, how well you lead, and how well you interact with others. Emotional energy is about the quality of energy.

Mental Energy

Mental energy is about the focus of your attention. We do our most effective work when we focus on one thing at a time. However, the average person in an organization in America stays on task for eleven minutes before moving on to another task. And it gets worse: during those eleven minutes they interrupt themselves with something else an average of every three minutes.

Spiritual Energy

This is the energy derived from the sense of living on purpose, and from an alignment of how you say you want to live your life and how you actually live. The better that alignment, the more powerful the source of energy available to you. This is the "why" energy.

“Audit time.”

Take an Energy Audit

How much energy do you have available to you?

This a test created by Tony Shwartz to help you audit your energy. For each statement below answer "true" or "false". The questions for which you answer "true" are the ones you need to work on.
  1. I don't regularly get 7 to 8 hours of sleep and I often wake up feeling tired.
  2. I frequently skip breakfast, or I settle for something that isn't particularly healthy.
  3. I don't work out enough, meaning cardiovascular training at least 3 times a week and strength training at least once a week.
  4. I don't take regular breaks during the day to renew and recharge, and I often eat lunch at my desk.
  5. I freqently find myself feeling irritable, impatient or anxious at work, especially when demand is high.
  6. I don't have enough time for my friends and family, and when I'm with them, I'm rarely "with them".
  7. I take too little time for the activities that I most deeply enjoy.
  8. I rarely stop to express my appreciation to others, or to savor and celebrate my accomplishments and blessings.
  9. I have difficulty focusing on one thing at a time and I'm easily distracted during my day, especially by email.
  10. I spend much of my time reacting to immediate demands, rather than focusing on activities with long-term value and higher leverage.
  11. I don't take enough time for reflection, strategizing and thinking creatively.
  12. I work in the evenings and/or the weekends and I rarely take a vacation free of work.
  13. I spend too little time at work doing what I do best and enjoy the most.
  14. There are significant gaps between what I say is important in my life and how I actually live.
  15. My decisions at work are more often influenced by external demands than by a strong, clear sense of my own purpose.
  16. I don't invest enough time or energy in making a positive difference to others or in the world.

More Books By Tony Schwartz

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Tony Schwartz Speaking at Google

Leading@Google Speaker Series

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Here Are the Last Five Posts on My Blog

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Poll: Your Energy Level

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"It's a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go."

Bertrand Russell

The Four Energy States

There are four energy states you can find yourself in during the course of a day. The quantity of energy available to you can be high or low, and the quality of that energy can be positive or negative. That is, you can fall into one of the following four combinations:

  • High - Positive
  • High - Negative
  • Low - Positive
  • Low - Negative
The Performance Zone is when you have high amounts of energy and the quality of the energy is positive. In the Performance Zone you feel calm, optimistic, challenged, creative, confident, and engaged. This is where your peak performance takes place.

When your energy is high but the quality of your energy is negative, you enter the Survival Zone. Here you feel defensive and fearful.

When you feel threatened--because your boss yelled at you, you have a problem at work that you can't solve, you're worried about meeting a deadline, or there are too many demands being placed on you--your body has the same physiological response that it has when it's in actual danger; one of these being that the blood rushes from your brain to your extremities so that you can either fight or take flight. That is, the blood is no longer in your brain, which is not a good thing if you have to think.

In addition to not being a zone in which you perform well, it's also terrible for your health. The hormone cortisol is very important in certain situations. However, when it stays in your body for very long it acts as a toxin.

When your energy is low and the quality of your energy is negative, you're in the Burnout Zone. Being in the Survival Zone drains energy, and if you spend too much time there you end up in the Burnout Zone.

Finally, when your energy is low but the quality of your energy is positive, you're in the Recovery Zone. This zone gets little respect in today's society. Many people tend to be pulled between the Performance Zone and the Survival Zone; if things get too bad they fall into the Burnout Zone.

However, the best movement for you to be making is intermittently and intentionally between the Performance Zone and the Recovery Zone. Human being are rhythmic, and we're designed to balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal if we're going to sustain energy at the highest level.

It's important for your performance to build renewal intermittently throughout your day. This is something Tony and his research team learned from athletes: they consistently found that athletes performed best when they respected the work-rest ratio.

Think of a Car Race

Is the driver who wins the race the one who drives the fastest, for the longest, the most continously? No; the winner is the driver that drives the fastest for the longest when he's driving, and recovers the most efficiently during pit stops. A pit stop takes about 15 seconds: they change the tires, refuel, sometimes change the windshield whippers, and so on. The crew is great at efficient recovery.

Energy Quotes

  • "Don't hold on to anger, hurt or pain. They steal your energy and keep you from love." -- Anonymous
  • "When I find myself fading, I close my eyes and realize my friends are my energy." -- Anonymous
  • "Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy." -- Vincent van Gogh
  • "Goals provide the energy source that powers our lives. One of the best ways we can get the most from the energy we have is to focus it. That is what goals can do for us; concentrate our energy." -- Denis Waitley
  • "The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have." -- Norman Vincent Peale
  • "Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can't build on it it's only good for wallowing in." -- Katherine Mansfield
  • "Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn't you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn't most of them turn out all right after all?" -- Dale Carnegie
  • "The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary." -- Thomas A. Edison
  • "Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all you energies on a limited set of targets." -- Nido Qubein
  • "Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you." -- Oprah Winfrey
  • "The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%." -- Andrew Carnegie
  • "Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital." -- Daniel Webster

“The greater the demand in your life, the greater the need for renewal.”

Important!

It's not the quantity of your recovery that matters, it's the quality. It's how well you recover, not for how long you recover.

Ultrarian Rhythms

At night you go through the Basic Rest Activity Cycle. All through the night, over periods of 90 to 120 minutes, you move from a light stage of sleep (REM), down into deep delta sleep. A similar cycle exists during the day.

When we're awake, every 90 to 120 minutes we move from a high state of physiological arousal, slowly down into a physiological drop. At that point, your body starts screaming at you: "Give me a break." Instead of taking a break, you probably reach out for a diet coke or a cup of coffee and keep going. You also override your body's need for a break with cortisol and adrenaline, the body's own speed.

What you want to do is build a rhythm throughout the day so that when you're working you're truly engaged, and when you're disengaged you're truly disengaged. Instead of being a marathon runner--where there's a long race out ahead with no end in sight, so you pace yourself--, be a sprinter. Marathon runners can't push themselves as hard as they can for an extended period of time, or they would drop like a stone.

The sprinter brings 100 percent engagement to the 100, 200, 300, or 400 yards in front of them. There's a finish line: they know they're going to give it their all for a finite period of time, and then stop and recover. Most of us have lost the finish lines in our life, we've lost the boundaries. We don't set stopping points.

Managing Energy Links

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
Harvard Business Review talks about the science of stamina.
Energy Management: Getting More Done
Read about doing less and getting more done on my blog.

To manage energy optimally, we have to build positive rituals; highly specific behaviors that become automatic over time.

We're Creatures of Habit

Our pre-frontal cortex is not the best way to make change. What we need to do instead is enlist the help of the automatic nervous system; that is, get help from the part of our physiology that gets things done automatically. We do this by training ourselves through regular repitition. The idea is to get ourselves to act without having to think about it.

Take a look back at the energy audit that you took above. What behaviors are you incurring in that you feel is having a high cost in the quantity and quality of your energy? Now ask: "What can I do to ritualize a change in behavior that would make it possible to give a "false" answer where you're currently giving a "true" answer?"

For example, start working out three days a week. Make it highly specific in time, highly specific in the behavior itself, and make it doable. Set down on your schedule that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays you're going to work out at 7:30 a.m. You're going to set out your clothes the night before and go to the gym down the street. By ritualizing the activity of getting exercise you'll be constantly and systematically renewing your energy.

Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online

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  • ChrisDiamond Sep 18, 2011 @ 3:08 am | delete
    Ha, Marelisa!

    Energy management is a kind of a new and more DEEP way of thinking when it comes to "time management." I've been listening to Tony Schwartz for quite some time and read his book "The Power Of Full Engagement" that you recommend, and I think it is one of the best guilds to productivity and self-development.

    This guy is a genius, he used to work with athletes and high performers to find out what good performers are doing differently from low performers. Now, he's more into the business world, helping others for more productive lifestyle!

    Liked your lens! You are a hard working woman! :-) Georgetown was not an accident! :P ha :-)
  • masterpies May 1, 2010 @ 2:03 am | delete
    very interesting
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Marelisa

Hi, I'm Marelisa Fabrega. I blog over at Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online.

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Georgetown... more »

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