Managing your energy

Energetic, amped up, friendly, and joyful. These are attributes of how we want everyone, but especially our leaders, to behave at all times. But that’s hard, and it seems like a lot of people wash out after 1 or 2 years after joining the company. Sometimes they become just quiet, other times they get cynical, reserved, and angry. I believe this has something to do with energy management, and I collected my approaches for conserving my mental health by managing my energy better.

The more you advance in your career, the more opportunities you get to organize your day and the order of activities more freely. But on the flip side, the expectations towards you will be more ambiguous and you’ll be evaluated on the outcomes of your work, not the activities you did. I try to leverage that to get the most energy out of my day while still doing all the things I am supposed to do.

This might seem in the realm of burnout prevention, but energy is just one variable of a larger equation that I want to focus on here. Maybe I’ll muster up the courage to talk more about my dance with burnout in further articles. Also please note that I’m neurotypical, and this advice won’t be helpful to others who are not.

Types of work

I read once that our work can be quantified as either energy-giving or energy-draining¹, and this model was very helpful for me to reason about my workday. It’s different for every individual where exactly a certain activity falls into, an it changes during someone’s career: For me, coding was initially very energy-draining when I started out. As I got more comfortable expressing thoughts in code over the years, it turned into an energizing activity, especially when I hit a flow state. I believe familiarity and mastery play a large role in this.

Energy giving work

These work items leave you amped up and energetic if you do them: For me, that is things like collaborative architecture sessions and mob programming: A group of smart people works together to figure something out.

Work that gets you rewards and recognition - releasing something great, making some numbers go up (or some bad numbers go down) can also give a meaningful boost. I try to seek out opportunities of that kind every once in a while, knowing that the excitement can fuel me for a bit.

Comfort Work

This is a fascinating concept I heard about is called comfort work: That’s work that you are not really supposed to do, but work that you used to be good at (and you still probably are), and performing these tasks can be very calming: Usually, they have a small, controlled scope and the outcomes are very predictable.

This could manifest as coding for Engineering Managers, intervening in Hiring and Team composition for VPs, or organizing Spreadsheets for Individual Contributors.

If this gives you a good boost of energy for a reasonable time investment, it’s probably okay to do these things once in a while, as long as you are aware of it and don’t mess it up for others. If you do this a lot though, then you should find ways to switch gears again.

Energy draining work

There are parts of your job that make sense - even to you - but they are still costly as you have to use skills and competencies that are not natural to you. Maybe it’s work that doesn’t fit your personality - like making small talk to a lot of unknown people on a Friday evening after work event for an introverted person.

As leaders, we occasionally have to disagree and commit. In a reasonable amount that’s a healthy thing to keep the organizational friction manageable, but it comes at a motivational and energy cost. So I try to be aware of the tasks that I dislike but still have to do. I remember being part of a planning cycle where I disagreed with the scope and approach to it, and if filled most of my days for weeks - I ran my personal battery deeply into the negative there.

Fights that you can’t win are a major source of energy burn: If there is something that you dislike about your organization you generally have three options:

• try to change it
• learn to live with it
• move on to another company

But you need to be realistic about what can be changed: If someone two ranks above you is being annoying, there’s very little you can do about that besides meeting that person for coffee and trying to understand their view of the world. Same goes for processes that are useful for senior leadership but annoying to you: Tough luck, you’ll have to do it anyways. I found just being intentional about my choice of action in these scenarios helps my mind and I don’t waste energy on them.

Structuring your day

If you can decide to just not do the energy-draining tasks, consider yourself lucky :) For everyone else, we can at least gain something by managing the order of tasks cleverly.

Assess where you at

If you want to get anywhere, you must first account for how you spend your day². I use my calendar religiously for that. That works for me as a large part of my day is spent meeting anyway, and creating new blocks for other work is not much effort. For others, other time-tracking tools might work better.

I mark calendar events/meetings with certain categories:

• Hiring
• People Work (e.g. 1-on-1s )
• Alignment ( usually meetings with multiple participants, and from other functions)
• Passive meetings (where I just have to listen, like an all-hands)

And I learned for myself that people work is usually energizing³, and hiring is very draining. Alignment and passive are rather neutral.

Find the right block sizes

Now that you know what works and what doesn’t, you can try to shift things in your day-to-day. Can you move 1-on-1s to another slot? Can you move your interview slots somewhere else, and leave a gap afterward for focus work to balance it out? It’s probably hard to do full spring cleaning on your calendar, but if you move just one or two instances per week, you might move already into a more manageable state.

For example, I learned (the hard way) that three interviews a day are not sustainable to me - even if these heroics get you celebrated for a little while, it leaves me too drained to do anything else meaningfully. So I started to say no and tried to balance it more during the week.

Do the hard stuff when you have the most energy

I usually have my best creative time in the mornings, before the madness machine wakes up. I chose to “sacrifice” some of these quiet blocks for Interviews - luckily that works for some interviewees who appreciate the interview slot outside of their core working hours. With that, I could shift at least three costly hours into a high-energy time, leaving enough to still make it through the day somewhat okay.

Delegate

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure⁴: Maybe this work has gotten quite boring to you but can be a growth opportunity for somebody who’s earlier in their career. If you can pull this off and delegate that work, you have a win-win situation on your hands. It’s rare, but it doesn’t hurt to evaluate it

Breaks after expensive work

Over the long run, breaks alone don’t help, you need to counteract them with energy-supplying tasks. But whenever I have to push through a large piece of energy-expensive work, I try to make deliberate breaks - with a focus on moving away from my desk: Going for a walk, yelling at a tree in my garden, or meeting someone for a longer lunch.

Summary

Just reasoning about what kind of work gives you energy, and what kind of work takes it away is half the battle, from there on you should be able to figure out how you can re-structure your working days to keep yourself high energy over multiple years, without having to hop onto the next job. Good luck!

Header Image by Thomas Kelley