Manage Your Time, or Manage Your Energy?

Managing my time is, for me, sort of like herding a flock of squirrels, Cape buffalo, and banana slugs. Maybe that’s why I immediately liked an idea my ex started talking about a few years ago: Manage your energy, not your time. That thought came to him one day as he meditated. Not coincidentally, it was soon after he stopped drinking coffee. He’d been wondering how he’d get through his days without caffeine.

Apparently, my ex is not the only person to suggest managing your energy instead of your time. A friend recently sent me a link to an interview with Tony Schwartz, co-author of a whole book on the topic.

I’ve only read the interview and whatever I could peruse of the book on Amazon, but here’s what I’ve taken away: Schwartz suggests examining what gives you energy and what depletes your energy in four areas: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. He also suggests working in “sprints,” interspersed with recovery time. And he talks about the “power of positive rituals.”

Managing energy seems like a particularly helpful idea for those of us with ADD, since we often have such difficulty getting a grasp on time. In my case, time doesn’t feel like it moves at a constant speed, I have the hardest time figuring out what to do when, and the same tasks can take me wildly differing amounts of time. I can more easily visualize how to alternate work and rest, how to nourish my body and spirit, and how to build comforting routines (but not too rigid a structure) into my life.

I realize I’ve done bits and pieces of energy management intuitively over the years, and I’ve let the concept slip into my consciousness a bit more lately. Here are a few things that help me: 

• I don’t tie the belt of my bathrobe to the chair in my home office for X number of hours. Instead, whenever my brain disengages, I go off and scrub a sink or do some knee exercises or something. When I come back to the office, my brain is usually good to go again. 
• I listen to the Doors or the Gipsy Kings or Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (the NPR news quiz) to keep my energy up when I do housekeeping.
• I go on frequent short hikes, eat plenty of protein and produce, and try really hard to go to bed at a reasonable time. (Um, it’s approaching 1 a.m. as I draft this. Apparently I have a ways to go on this last one. )
• I do one- to ten-minute guided meditations on the computer (more on that in a future blog post).
• I fit in fun stuff—camping, miniature golf, folk-dancing, wading in the creek, box games with my daughter.
• I go to support groups and call people and get together for walks and tea. 
• I keep honing my routines around housekeeping, work, exercise, and all the rest. 
• I’m trying to stick with work I’m passionate about. 
• I practice gratefulness.

Most of those things take time. But they do give me energy.

Still, sometimes I’m afraid that if I engage in enough energy-building activities to really help (am I high maintenance in this way?), I won’t have enough time left to do much actual work. Maybe it’s time to read Schwartz’s book and implement the concept more deliberately. My ex found the book a year or so after his own revelation, and he recommends it.

Are there ways you manage your energy, as opposed to your time? Feel free to chime in by commenting!   
 

Here’s the short interview with Tony Schwartz that my friend sent me.

Tony Schwartz and co-author Jim Loehr’s book is The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.

Here’s a strategy for doing homework that fits into Loehr and Schwartz’s model.

Here are the Gipsy Kings performing "Bamboleo" live. The song is good for almost five minutes of energetic housework:

Comments

[Alyce Barry]

I love the song "Bamboleo," I often use it during a workshop to get people moving during a break. A few months ago I listened to it as I came down a mountain after a strenuous hike, and I fairly danced down the hillside.

Gotta ask, though, what on earth is a banana slug?

[Laurel Kallenbach]

Wow! I've never heard of managing your energy, although it makes sense. I'm often down on myself because of my lack of time management, and looking back I often think that my problem is that I get sidetracked by things that aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things. Like washing dishes or vacuuming or cleaning out drawers. I do stuff like that and then can't believe I squandered precious time on something so trivial.