Time and Energy

For too many years I got this equation wrong. I thought it was about time...budgeting, prioritizing, structuring. I was a GTD junky (Getting Things Done.) I went through most of the systems out there. None of them worked for long. What was missing was, like most people I know, I had flipped the equation on its head.

It's easy, when we're working, to think our time is the critical factor. But let's explore what happens when we make energy the focus instead.

Every day we wake up with a certain amount of energy. Depending on how well we slept, what we did the night before and the size of our battery. We get additional reserves and capacity from exercise and what we eat.

The same 3 hour period at work may consume 30% of this, or it may consume 60%, depending on the nature of the task and the way we manage our energy. On days where we blow our energy early, we don't have much left over for things like family, taking care of ourselves and activities that enrich us.

Once we start observing how we are spending energy, rather than time, we may learn some interesting things. Some of them are counter-intuitive.

For example, it's seldom work or chores that actually sap energy, instead it's often 'leaks.'

We may not notice those donuts or quick bite we snatched at a drive-thru to save time actually incurred a major withdrawal from our energy account the rest of the day. The time we bought sleeping in instead of working out, actually reduced the reserves for the next several days. Even the type of thoughts we choose to entertain may leave us with little energy after we get home to do anything other than 'veg' out in front of the t.v. and netflix in an attempt to escape the demands for cleaning the house, doing the laundry and taking care of logistics. Then the tasks loom even larger, suck even more energy, as things pile up. We fight like heck to "protect" our time from these pesky chores while punching holes in our energy tanks.

When we start becoming energy conscious, we may begin noticing that something innocuous like hangin out on facebook or surfing the internet, mysteriously saps the energy left over for projects we're exciting about or directions we would passionately like to pursue, if we just had more energy. And oddly, this "down" time of distractions, which seems to require minimal energy, does nothing to replenish us.

As we get older, this habitual way of dealing with time, rather than energy, takes a heavier and heavier toll. We may find ourselves in a depressing cycle, dreaming about a 'tomorrow' where we get everything under control, where the conditions are better, where we take a nice vacation.

But tomorrow is just another miscalculation. Just misplaced attention. When we change our basic orientation, to one of energy suddenly things start becoming clearer. Brighter. We begin rationing energy instead of time and we find it was the tail wagging the dog all along. With an abundance of energy, we find we actually do have the time for all those things we want to accomplish. And not only that, we are far more alive and see more immediate gain than when we were trying to organize our time instead of our energy.