The ABCs Of Energy Management
The ABCs Of Energy Management
26 Ways to Fix Energy Leaks And Better Capitalize On Your Inner Life Force
When it comes to Productiveness, time management is but a drop in the ocean.
If you master the ABCs of time management, pat yourself on the back—then move on. Time management skills are productivity 101, mere baby steps on the journey of personal accomplishment, and not even worth a humble brag.
True personal accomplishment is all about pacing yourself. It’s about efficiently and effectively converting your highly limited inner resources into the results you desire. On this trajectory, time is important, but it pales in comparison to the significance of properly leveraging your inner “life force.”
Life force, inner power, or simply “energy” is hard to define precisely because it isn’t just one single thing. It’s a concept used to describe an emergent phenomenon that arises from a myriad of factors: your physiology, emotions, and drives; your mindset, motivation, “willpower”, routines and even your sense of direction—all of these contribute to a kind of “inner capital” you draw from whenever you take action.
Even though I can’t give you a precise definition here, you’re probably aware of what I’m talking about. It likely makes sense to you when I say that if your source of energy in life is weak or you don’t direct it to the right places, your output will inevitably suffer. But there’s a third, more insidious component of energy mismanagement that you may haven’t considered: the energy loss along the way. Even if you have a large amount of power to draw from and direct it where it needs to go, as long as your system has holes and “leaks” energy, your throughput will be low.
Energy leakage refers to recurring energy losses along the way, like holes in water pipes that accumulate to cause significant loss over time. With a system full of such leaks, it’s all too easy to burn through your fuel without making any meaningful progress day after day. It won’t matter much if you’ve reached a certain level of time management proficiency because time won’t be your problem anymore. Instead, your bottleneck will be a lack of energy.
Energy leaks can occur for many reasons: poor sleep, inefficiencies in your workflow, a lack of habits and routines, or even being unclear about your core values. In fact, the sources of energy leaks are so varied that, in writing this piece, I had (almost) no trouble identifying 26 ways to improve and capitalize on your energy resources—one for each letter of the alphabet. So, what follows could aptly be called the ABCs of Energy Management, though this list is likely far from exhaustive.
Interestingly, in writing this piece, I found myself naturally linking out to many other of my articles, showing how tightly interwoven “energy management” and personal accomplishment truly are.
The ABCs of Energy Management
A - Automatize Things
Repetitive manual processes are energy leaks. If you don’t automate, you waste valuable energy on what could be done for you by a machine. A useful heuristic here is The Rule of Three—if you find yourself repeating the same manual task for the third time, take a moment to check if there’s a way to automate it for the future. ChatGPT & friends can help you gather ideas on how to automate something, even if you’re not a techie. In some cases, ChatGPT itself can even be part of the automation, e.g., I sometimes use it to reformat long pieces of text or tables.
In case there’s no straightforward way to automate something, you can alternatively consider leveraging smart defaults to make some work implicit.
B - Take Smart Breaks
Your life force highly depends on the vitality of your body; a healthy body yields much more power than a broken or sick one. While the biggest leverage and recharge for our bodies happens at night, there are ways to “top up” during the day. Smart breaks are among the biggest of them. Taking smart breaks allows you to work in alignment with your natural rhythms and leverage several strategic synergies. Although smart breaking won’t directly fix energy leaks, a lack of such breaks can create them. If you power through for too long without proper rest, you incur what could be called an “overdrawing cost” that can drain your overall energy reserves.
C - Clarify Commitments
Commitments are promises to yourself. When you have true commitments, you reduce energy leaks caused by repetitive decision-making, permanently switching between initiatives, and being at odds with things. With clear, well-defined commitments, you don’t need to question what to work on next. If your commitments are truly heartfelt, you can also trust they are meaningful, which allows you to block out enticing distractions that aren’t purpose-driven.
I have a very relevant series on life design and a particular piece about the importance of commitments, which you can find here:
D - Work Deep
We’ve all heard how futile “multitasking” can be. Each time we switch between substantially different activities, we incur a “switching cost”—an energy drain that can quickly get out of hand if not managed deliberately. Switching costs are a natural part of any productive day, but if left unchecked, they can become a huge energy leak. One effective way to combat this is by engaging in more deep work sessions (DWS). While deep work is intense and demands a lot of energy, it typically offers a higher return on investment than constantly switching around tasks. Also, during DWS, the likelihood of energy being derailed and spilled around is greatly reduced.
I see deep focus as one of the two core components of being Productive with a capital P, the other one being fractal awareness. You can dive deeper into this topic in my seminal but highly underrated piece on Productiveness with a capital P:
E - Set A Proper Engagement Game Plan
Having a well-thought-out game plan for how and with what you engage daily is crucial for directing your energy to the right places. By developing a clear strategy for tackling your work, you can ensure that your efforts are focused and purposeful, minimizing wasted and misdirected energy. A proper engagement plan helps you approach efforts intentionally and with little need for deliberation on the day-to-day level.
I have a very relevant series on life design ongoing and the next part will be about the importance of proper engagement. You can read the first and second parts here:
F - Prune Friction
Friction often seems like a minor annoyance, but it can accumulate quickly if not addressed promptly. Left unchecked, friction can overwhelm us, turning our days into firefighting sessions instead of productive work. Friction often causes a direct energy leak, sapping your focus and efficiency. I recommend keeping a friction log and setting up a regular ritual to prune friction from your system to combat this. You can maintain a smoother, more efficient workflow by consistently addressing and eliminating hiccups.
G - Set Clear Goals
Goals matter! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Clear, well-defined goals help you channel your energy more purposefully, preventing it from being wasted on irrelevant things. However, setting goals is not easy—it took me many years to get good at it. Despite the challenges, having clear goals has been invaluable in directing my energy to the right places and avoiding unnecessary energy leaks. By setting precise goals, you can ensure that your efforts are focused and impactful.
Goals matter the most on the highest level, the most upstream level of aspiration.
I have a very relevant series on life design and a particuar piece about the importance of aspiration:
H - Build Habits
One effective way to reduce energy leaks is by building habits, routines, and rituals. These practices lower the energy expenditure required for tasks you want to do repeatedly. Habits minimize activation energy and the need for decision-making, as they happen almost automatically. This reduces the energy needed for the habituated action itself, and it helps your day run more smoothly overall. We only get dealt so much mental bandwidth every day. By establishing habits and well-practiced sequences of activities, we can fit “more” into our days and get “more” out of our limited energy supply.
I - Identify Your Wells
Understanding what energizes you—whether it’s certain types of work, physical activity, or social interactions—is another great way to manage your energy more effectively. Identify the personal “energy wells” in your days and make them a priority in your schedule. Maybe it’s the after-work playlist to boost your mood or schedule a walk or strength workout during an extended lunchtime. By aligning your daily activities with what revitalizes you, you can maintain higher energy levels throughout the day and ensure that you operate at your best.
J - Work Just-in-Time
A significant amount of energy can be wasted on doing the wrong things. We often don’t know what will be relevant in the end. However, the closer we get to a deadline, the more information we have, allowing us to make better decisions about what’s truly worth working on. Instead of “precrastinating” and working on tasks overly proactively, “just in case,” aim to complete most of your work “just in time,” right before it’s actually needed. This approach, similar to the software engineering principle YAGNI (“you-ain’t-gonna-need-it”), helps minimize wasted effort on irrelevant tasks.
While this might sound like the last-minute cramming of a student, it’s actually a strategic way to conserve energy and focus on what truly matters. If you find this approach challenging, consider exploring the Do It Tomorrow productivity system.
K - Embed Kaizen into Your Workflows
Kaizen, the practice of small, iterative, and continuous improvement, is a powerful tool for refining your processes over time. By embedding Kaizen into your workflows, you can detect energy leaks earlier and methodically patch them up one by one. One of my favorite ways to apply this principle is by adding a “Kaizen step” to my digital productivity routines or “productivity hygiene”.
A closely related approach I use is what I call “magnitude tuning,” where you gradually improve and fine-tune your routines over time. These small, consistent adjustments can lead to significant gains in efficiency and energy management.
L - Allow for Leisure & Leeway
We often encounter resistance when tackling tasks—we know we need to do something, but we just don’t feel like it. The typical response is to “power through,” relying on self-discipline to push past the resistance. While this can work, it’s also a heavy drain on energy. Brute-forcing our way through tasks is sometimes necessary, but often, it’s not. Most resistance is temporary, and if you wait it out, it often resolves on its own. You can save a lot of energy by allowing for more spontaneous leisure and, even more importantly, building in “leeway” into your days. I call this approach “surfing entropy” because instead of throwing energy at our problems, you learn to ride the motivational waves that naturally ebb and flow throughout the day. By doing so, you align your efforts with your energy levels, making your work both more efficient and less taxing.
M - Separate Modes & Foster Mindsets
Avoid mixing different modes of work, like editing while drafting or analyzing while skimming. Keeping different modes of work separate prevents unnecessary mental strain. Another important part of energy management is that of working on your mindset. Because if you believe you are weak or lack energy, you may be right through a self-fulfilling prophecy.
One particular mindset I endores is called the Doer Mindset. You can read all about it here:
N - Learn to Say »No«
The simplest way to save energy is to do less, especially less of what others ask of you. Learning to say “No” can be a powerful move in fixing energy leaks. By saying no to unnecessary work, you preserve your energy for the things that truly matter, allowing you to focus on your priorities and achieve more meaningful results.
O - Get Organized
Being organized reduces friction, stress, and mental load, which makes it much easier to stay energized. By streamlining your environment and processes, you minimize distractions and decision fatigue, allowing you to direct your energy where it’s needed most. Two things I highly recommend in this arena are keeping a dedicated task manger and feeding a personal knowledge companion
Personal knowledge management (PKM) helps you quickly access all you personal information and ideas without frustration and energy loss. I have a whole series on managing personal knowledge with the PARA method or the more advanced PEAKER method:
I also recently started a second newsletter with small bite-sized FAQ kind of pieces on PKM, if you are interested. You need to subscribe to it in your settings.
P - Beat The P-Challenges of Productivity
Procrastination and perfectionism are two productivity challenges frequently discussed in our community, and for good reason. They generate a lot of attention and often dominate the conversation because they can significantly drain our energy reserves. When we procrastinate, we typically divert our energy to unimportant tasks, wasting valuable resources on things that don’t truly matter. On the other hand, when we fall into the trap of perfectionism, we expend far too much energy on trivial details, often at the expense of more meaningful work. Learning to beat these two beasts—procrastination and perfectionism—can make a substantial difference in your energy management. By addressing these challenges head-on, you can reclaim your focus and direct your energy toward what really counts.
Interestingly, a lot can achieved in these areas simply by learning to size one's work properly and to find the “size that works” for everything we do.
Q - Find The Right Question
I’ve found that often, once I discover the right question to solve a problem or achieve a goal, the answer becomes almost immediately apparent. Not all the work we do is valuable; tasks that seem essential at the moment often turn out to be only semi-critical. This is largely because we’re asking the wrong questions. By regularly questioning and eliminating tasks that don’t contribute to our overall goals, we can save energy and focus on what truly matters. But sometimes, it’s also necessary to step back, zoom out, and tackle the big, overarching questions. Finding the right question is often the key to unlocking the most effective path forward.
R - Rest Thoroughly
Good sleep is the foundation for maintaining high energy levels throughout the day. Prioritize sleep as a critical part of your productivity strategy. While improving your sleep environment can be beneficial, it’s even more important to understand your chronotype, identify your personal sleep needs, and stick to a relatively stable sleep schedule. By aligning your rest with your natural rhythms, you can optimize your energy levels and enhance your overall productivity. But sleep is only the rest of the day. Try also to rest at least one day per week and a whole week per quarter. On an even larger scale, it is really refreshing to engage in small sabbaticals of several months. If you can make this work, I highly recommend it.
S - Remove Ambient Stressors
Ambient stress is a major drain on our energy. While small amounts of stress can be beneficial—like the kind we experience during a workout, which ultimately makes us stronger—chronic stress is a different story. Identifying and removing persistent stressors from our lives can free up significant internal resources. However, this is often easier said than done, as stress can be subtle and difficult to detect. To better evaluate your stress levels, consider asking those around you how stressed you appear to them or using tools like heart rate variability (HRV) trackers to monitor your stress more objectively. By becoming more aware of your stressors and addressing them, you can reduce a significant source of energy leakage.
T - Track Where Your Time Goes
Tracking your time can be a powerful tool for identifying energy-draining activities and making necessary adjustments to optimize your day. You can use automatic or manual time-tracking tools to keep tabs on how you spend your hours. While time tracking is clearly helpful for improving time management, the real benefit lies in uncovering energy wasters. With a comprehensive time log, you’ll become more aware of where most of your time—and energy—actually goes, allowing you to make informed decisions about allocating your resources more effectively.
U - Increase Understanding
This tip may seem less obvious—how can increased understanding lower energy expenditure? The answer lies in cognitive efficiency. As soon as you truly understand something, the mental effort required to reason about it decreases. Deepening your understanding of a task, for instance, reduces the cognitive strain involved in tackling it. When you fully grasp what you’re doing and why, you can approach a task with greater clarity and confidence, which in turn conserves energy. The more you know about the work at hand, the smoother and more effective your execution will be.
V - Banish “Energy Vampires”
Energy vampires are people, activities, or habits that drain your energy without providing any meaningful value in return. These can subtly sap your strength, leaving you feeling depleted without realizing why. To maintain your energy levels and focus on what truly matters, it’s essential to identify these suckers in your life and take steps to minimize or eliminate them. By doing so, you can reclaim your energy and direct it toward more productive and fulfilling pursuits.
W - Reduce Waste
Waste here refers to any work that doesn’t contribute meaningfully to your goals. It’s the unnecessary efforts you engage in, the detours you take to procrastinate, the opportunities to automate or improve that you overlook, and the obsolete tasks you continue doing out of habit rather than necessity. To ensure your energy is used efficiently, you should learn to detect waste whenever you come across it. It pays to regularly check your workflows, setups, and approaches to detect and eliminate waste.
One example of a waste-detection procedure is tacking stock of your whole set of digital tools by creating a “digital inventory”.
Here is a concrete examples of how this can look like:
More generally, it payes to understand the anatomy of productivity setups in general.
And it also pays to learn about and dicern the protocols that govern your life:
X - Untie Your X-Knots
“X-knots” (Existential Knots) are deep, lingering issues or problems that silently drain your energy over time. These are not problems with quick fixes; rather, they require ongoing work, often over many years or even decades. If left untangled, X-knots can wreak havoc over a lifetime, consuming large chunks of your energy by repeatedly attracting your thoughts—day after day, week after week, year after year. Addressing and gradually resolving these deeper issues can free up significant mental and emotional resources, allowing you to reclaim the energy that has been quietly slipping away.
Y - Avoid Yak Shaving
Yak shaving refers to getting caught up in a series of small, seemingly related tasks that don’t actually contribute to your primary goal. It’s like getting lost in The Forest, where distractions pull you away from what really matters. Recognizing the pull of The Vortex of distraction and actively fighting these “distractions” is crucial.
One of my favorite methods for staying focused is using a daily note in Obsidian to structure my days.
However, simply shielding yourself from distractions isn’t enough. The more insidious challenge is forgetting. When you forget your main objectives or lose sight of your progress, you end up doing work that doesn’t need to be done, leaking energy into the wrong places. I consider this the biggest productivity challenge of all, yet one that often goes unrecognized.
Z - Banish Zeigarniks
Zeigarniks, or “Open Loops” as they are more commonly known, are those lingering thoughts and unfinished tasks that stick around in your mind, decreasing your mental WIP limit. If you don’t map these tasks out of your head and onto paper, they will continue to haunt you, occupying mental space and diminishing your cognitive performance. This mental clutter not only reduces your efficiency but also saps your energy, making it harder to focus on what truly matters. By regularly clearing out these open loops and keeping your mind free of unnecessary residue, you can maintain higher levels of mental clarity and conserve valuable energy.
Conclusion
Personal Energy Management is partly about increasing the overall energy available and partly about how to direct it into the right places. However, it is also about detecting and patching up leaks in your system that negatively affect you. I hope my ABCs of energy management gave you ample ideas on where to find some potential leaks in your system.
If you have more tips on this please share them with us below.