Manage Your Mojo, Not Your Time.

Ever struggled with completing tasks despite knowing they’re essential? Or felt disappointed with your work, thinking it took too long for produced and wasn’t at the quality you’d have liked it to be? I know I have! So you’re not alone.

Don’t blame yourself for being “lazy”; motivation, focus, and attention are scarce resources. It’s not just about time and task management; it’s about managing your energy.

Why Managing Energy is Crucial

For knowledge workers, results matter more than the hours you put in. There is often a relationship between how much time you put into a piece of work and the resulting utility and quality. If you just slap something together, people will notice. But on the flip side, just because you put a lot of time and effort into working on something does not mean that it is your best work.

It is not enough to just produce; you need to do it in the right way, with the right intention.

If you put a lot of thought, skill, and craft into creating something, it shows. The quality of the work will be higher. But having the right skills is not enough. Producing quality work requires that you connect with the work; it needs to be meaningful to you. The quality of energy that you put into it will show up in the output’s quality.

And if you put out better quality work:

you will get better results.
You will feel better about yourself.

How you approach the work matters much more than you think.

Awareness is Key

Most of us spend the bulk of our time being unaware of our current energy levels. We run around on “auto-pilot,” bouncing from meeting to meeting and reading and replying to the endless stream of emails and the deluge of instant messages that assault us all day long.

If we just stop for a few minutes to notice how we are feeling and, more importantly, why we feel that way, we can gain powerful insights that we can then act upon. You’ll be able to use these insights to help you manage your energy more effectively.

You’ll be able to manage your energy levels if you can invest a bit of time into learning:

what activities drain your energy
what activities replenish your energy supply

Humans are complicated machines; there is no one universal way of “recharging” yourself. Of course, some approaches work well for many people, but it is necessary to invest some time in exploring what works for you.

Do an “energy audit.”

To manage your energy, you first need to identify your “energy vampires”—those activities that drain you. Then, discover your “super-chargers”—activities that restore and boost your energy.

Step 1: Spot Your Energy Vampires

The first step is to identify all the things that leave you feeling drained afterwards, which I like to call “energy vampires.”

To figure out what yours are, stop for 30 seconds at various points during the day and note how you feel. Are you feeling tired? Uninspired? Groggy? If so, the activity that you just did might be one of your “energy vampires.”

My “energy vampires” are:

over-eating or eating heavily processed foods
spending time in a car
administrative-type work tasks
work tasks I can’t connect to the “big picture” of what we are trying to do
meetings with many people
being around people that constantly complain or blame others

Any time I have any of the above experiences, my energy levels deplete.

Once you know the activities that deplete your energy, it is time to figure out how to bring your charge yourself back up.

Step 2: Identify Your Super-Chargers

Things would be so much easier if we could just plug ourselves into one of these Tesla super-chargers to get our energy levels back up. But it’s more complicated than that. There is no universal charger for humans.

That means that you need to figure out what activities restore your energy levels, getting you fired up and ready to take on the world.

While we all have different things that can restore energy, there are a few that we have in common:

Sleep. This is one of the more obvious ways of restoring energy. The importance of getting enough sleep is very well documented. Getting proper sleep is one of the best investments in productivity, health, and well-being that you can make.
Exercise. It seems counter-intuitive that doing exercise will restore energy rather than drain it. Still, science shows that it boosts energy levels. While you may be physically tired right after exercising, moving your body generates chemicals that replenish your energy levels. I had always looked at exercise as a longer-term investment in health, but there are also short-term benefits, like boosting your energy levels. Another reason to move!
Meaningful work. I was surprised when I discovered that doing “work” can boost energy levels. The trick is that it needs to be the “right” work. Work can drain you — and it does for so many people. That is why intentionally crafting the perfect role for yourself is so critical. When you are working on some tasks, they can fire you up. For that to happen, I have found that you need to work on tasks that have (at least a couple of) the following characteristics: the task is meaningful to you, you have control over how you tackle the task it is a challenging task, but one that you possess the ability to complete if you stretch yourself it leverages your “super-powers.”

You will probably have additional ways of bringing your energy levels back up, methods that work specifically for you. You’ll need to discover what those are for yourself.

The things that bring my energy level up for me include;

listening to inspiring podcasts
playing piano
doing some creative writing
closing my eyes with some favourite music blasting through my headphones
getting out for a walk in nature
brainstorming about what steps I might take on big goals that I have
learning something about a topic that I am interested in

When I feel my energy levels dip, I can just take a bit of time to do one of those activities, and my energy levels climb back up. Even 15 minutes can be enough for me to notice the benefit.

The exercise to figure out what recharges you is very similar to how you discovered what drains you; pause during the day and pay attention to how you feel. Take stock of how you are feeling after doing a task. That bit of introspection is key to understanding what charges you up and what drains you.

Once you understand what drains your energy and how to restore your energy levels, you have all the tools you need to maximize your output.

Step 3: Structure your work optimally

Equipped with this essential self-knowledge, you’re now ready to optimize your day. Reflect on the most important tasks and try to organize your day so that you’re working on them when you’ll have the most energy available for the work. You can plan out your day accordingly. If you see you have too many energy-draining activities, inject some of your “super-chargers” in at various points of the day.

You’ll need to monitor your energy level regularly, taking on the most challenging parts of work and life when your energy level is high enough. And take the time to charge it back up when it gets too low. You do this to your phone; surely you can give the same attention to your body.

By doing the right work at the right time — with the right energy — you can get more done. It is all about working smart.

What are some ways that you recharge? What drains you? Did you try this exercise, and if so — what were the results? Shoot me an email and let me know!

Quotation that I’ve been pondering

The longer you’ve worked in your field, the deeper entrenched your ways of thinking about your work become. While there’s a lot of benefit to years of experience, there’s also a lot of benefit to the “beginner’s mind”, where you don’t get bogged down in preconceptions about how things need to be.

Reid Hoffman really summed that idea up well with this quote:

“For many people ’20 years of experience’ is really one year of experience repeated 20 times.”

How might you approach your work in a novel and interesting new way?

Journal prompt

“What do you think about when you see your reflection in the mirror? Is it a positive or a negative viewpoint? And what might that tell you about a potential change you could make?”

Call to Adventure

If you’re feeling inspired to shake up your career and start aligning your work with what truly matters to you, I’m here to help. In a 60-minute career strategy call, we’ll work together to uncover what you really want from your professional life and map out some clear, actionable steps to get you closer to it. Whether it’s finding more balance, reigniting your passion, or taking that bold next move, I’ve got you covered.

Whenever you’re ready, I’m here to help you craft the next chapter of your career—one that works for you.

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