5 Ways to Have More Energy in Your Days and Weeks ✨

5 Ways to Have More Energy in Your Days and Weeks ✨

You can spend an hour of time looking at your Google calendar every single week. You can create as much accountability as you want. If you are managing your energy, your days and weeks will not turn out the way that you want them to. 

Energy management is one prong of getting things done that heavily takes you into account. Energy management gives flow. It gives flexibility. It gives self-compassion. Personally, I think the magic is in mixing both those things together and adding more of whatever works for you because we all work differently.

In this article, I'm going to talk about some really actionable ways that you can embrace energy management in your life. 

Create An Energy Budget

An energy budget is designed for times when you mistake yourself as an extrovert. Times when you overexert yourself to please other people or just times when you get overly ambitious about your energy levels. This is a budget you can refer to whenever someone asks you to hang out whenever you are planning your week. 

One way to design your energy budget is to draw up a sheet of paper with two columns and in one column you want to put your energy-giving task. In another column, you want to put your energy-taking tasks. With your list of energy-taking tasks, You want to decide how much time you want to give to those tasks.

So for example, if you're a low-energy introvert, going to an event alone where you know no one. It might get one slot a month or one’s little quarter. Time spent at the shopping center might get one hour a week max. Maybe you're only allowed one plan per weekend day. When you are making plans when you're being asked to partake in plans, ask yourself, does this fit into my energy budget. 

Go Big On What You Love 

Go big on what you love brutally cut everything else. Ramit Sethi talks about how you should spend lavishly on the things that you love and cut brutally on everything else. So if you love coffee, spend lavishly on your daily coffees by the fancy extras. Order your specialty coffee subscription box. Get the fancy coffee maker.

On the flip side, if you find that drinking alcohol is something that you do, but you don't really enjoy it. So maybe you drink because people around you are drinking, but it's not something that you're like, yes, this is a big part of my life. Cut your alcohols settings to as low as possible.

Go big on the good stuff, cut brutally on everything else. Do the same thing when you were designing your time. So if you desperately love being in nature, turn that up on full blast. If you're pretty neutral about formal dining environments, going to restaurants then turn that right down. 

Be wildly generous with the time that you give to the things that lift you up the most, and be brutal about cutting down time spent on everything else. And that includes things that take the energy things that bring you down, but also things that are generally neutral in your life that you maybe don't feel strongly towards one way or the other. Don't let that stuff take up your time. 

The reason this relates to energy management is that when you fill your life with things that you enjoy doing things that are energy-giving, it's a way of easily maintaining your energy. Whereas when you fill your life with neutral or energy-taking things, it's an easy way to sap your energy.

All work Is Not Created Equal 

Put less effort into less important tasks. So Sreyastoshi, a startup advisor, tells his clients to divide their tasks up into three different categories. Leverage, Neutral, and Overhead. 

Leverage tasks those tasks that 10 times your impact. When you were doing leverage tasks, you are doing a great job. So your inner perfectionist, let it shine. Neutral tasks are necessary and will move the needle but the needle is moving inches, not miles. With neutral tasks, You do a good job not better. Overhead tasks are a necessary evil and they may have a low impact but also, if they're not done, things are going to tumble. It's not going to be a good time. But with these tasks, you actively want to try and do a bad job and put as least energy as possible into them.

So frameworks like this, make sure that you don't pour all of your energy into the wrong tasks. Like you don't want to be pouring all your energy into your administrative work. They also allow you to align your energy with your task. So when you're in a high-energy state, you can pick those leverage tasks and vice versa if you're in a low energy state, you pick the low energy tasks. You're working with your energy. Don't use your energy on repetitive tasks.

Focus On Slow Burns Not Heavy Lifts

So this is a concept from building a second brain by Tiago Forte, which is a system for organizing your mind. So you know, when you get a whole bunch of groceries, and you decide that the best way to get them inside is to stack all of them on both of your arms, despite being a petite woman with very little upper body strength.

So naturally, you drop a bag. A few things tumble out. You decide halfway that you need a rest but then it's really hard to get back up because you have so many bags, you just dump them on the counter and whatever order, even that makes it really inconvenient to unpack everything that is a heavy lift.

Honestly, I do think that heavy lifts occasionally can be good. Sometimes you need a heavy lift. But what heavy lifts do is they ask for all of your energy in one go, and they leave you depleted. And because you're doing it all in one go, sometimes things get missed, they get left behind, they get skipped over.

So Tiago Forte, the creator of building a second brain talks about how you should focus more on slow burns. What this can look like in more of a task context is slowly gathering things over time. You're managing your energy by making things easier to start, easier to complete, and not expending all of your energy through heavy lifts.

Monitor Your Self-Care

Something I realize is that advice that smart people who are struggling hate to get are things like drink more water, go on more walks, get outside, eat your vegetables, connect with people. And I think the reason for that is because it feels really trivial, it feels really obvious. No one really wants trivial and obvious advice, because we're all so busy searching for like big intricate, complex nuggets of wisdom that just going to hit right and make the biggest of differences.

But sometimes it's the most basic advice that is the most effective. Most of that basic advice has been studied and shown to increase your happiness and energy levels. People who manage their energy, manage their self-care because they know that if they're not taking care of themselves, their energy levels plummet.

An easy way that you can do this is to just rate the self-care pillars that are in front of my face from one to ten. You can do this weekly, monthly, quarterly. Mess with the frequency until you can do it consistently. When you find you lower on the nutrition scale, put a little bit more energy into nutrition. The goal is to identify things before you fall behind completely. So identify things when maybe you're a little bit off track rather than when you are fully at rock bottom.

 I appreciate you so very much, and I will see you soon.