Energy Management
Did you know that energy management is just as important as time management? Very much like time, you also have a finite resource of energy and things you do can either increase or decrease your energy making you more efficient and productive or leaving you feeling burned out and on the brink of a breakdown. In this week’s episode were talking about what energy management is and why you need to know about it plus I’m sharing the 3 things that may be zapping your energy and what to do about them.
What is it?
Energy management is rather than looking at how much time you spend on a specific task whether it be independent work or collaboration, let’s say a meeting, you look at how you energetically feel before, during and after.
Why it is important?
Energy management is key to understanding your personal energy rhythm and also how you can productively and efficiently plan activities. When you can manage your energy, you’re able to use it more efficiently which ultimately allows you to operate at a more optimal performance.
Here are 3 things that may be zapping your energy:
Content Switching
Constantly checking email
Distractions
Context switching is when you go from one type of task to another type of task. For example, if you have a meeting scheduled at 9am and it ends at 9:45. After that call you need to put a proposal together. Then at 10:30AM you have another call. You’re switching in between two different types of tasks that require two different types of energy. Every time you switch you expend more energy.
Checking email can zap your energy, especially if you check it knowing that whatever is in your inbox you won’t actually be able to take action on it.
Distractions…did you know that it takes on average 22 minutes to recover from a distraction? Email, dings, texts, calls. Consider how much energy is being zapped through the distraction.
Here are a few tips on how to reduce the things zapping your energy…
To reduce context switching try to schedule like activities around like activities. Rather than scheduling meetings or calls any day of the week, is there an opportunity to schedule them all on a certain day, back to back so you can ride the momentum of being in that energy.
Checking email. Can you designate certain times of the day when you check email? Or can you practice avoiding checking email first thing in the morning and instead use that morning time to get deep work done? A tool I like to use is Inbox Pause. It is an extension for Gmail and it allows you to pause your inbox so that you don’t see incoming emails while you’re doing things inside your inbox.
Distractions…can you put your phone on DND for certain times of the time, leave it in another room, close out any browsers on your computer while doing certain work.
My challenge to you is to pick one of the three…whether it be context switching, email checking or distractions, and focus on how you can improve that ONE area for the next week.
Will you practice scheduling calls closer together, on specific days?
Will you commit to not checking email until after a certain time of day?
Will you use the DND function on your phone or better yet, leave for your phone in another room even if it is for 30 minutes?
Take a picture and tag me over on Instagram at @attentionaudit. I’d love to see you use it in action!
Until next week, take care my friend!
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