These days I teach a class called The Changing Workplace to graduate students at a local university in Cincinnati. It’s a class on leadership and how to drive organizational change and innovation in the workplace. Much of what we cover is standard material that one would expect in a masters level business school program. As I put the class together, though, I realized that no one can change an organization unless they have the energy to do so. So, I assign an article called “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” and ask the students to create a personal energy management game plan. (Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy, Harvard Business Review, October 2007).
The results stun me every time I teach the class. The basic point of the article is that human beings tend to think that they are constrained by time, but since time is fixed and no one knows how much of it they have, the better idea is to realize that we are constrained by energy. As anyone who has ever taken a walk and then been much more productive when they got back to work knows, there are things we can do to generate more energy, to be more present in the moment at hand. The authors break down energy into four categories – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual – and then include an energy self-assessment at the end of the article.
The majority of my students score themselves as having a major energy deficit, we might even call it an energy crisis, on the self-assessment.
I’ve been teaching this class long enough to conclude that there is something structural going on here; these results are not random events, and are not unique to graduate students who are also working jobs in Cincinnati.
Energy Deficits
The more that I think about it, the more I realize how much energy deficits negatively impact our lives in countless ways.
My students are very good people with the best of intentions, just like all the people that showed up in my office over the last thirty years; people who came into my office — often with a work problem which, upon further review, was really a life problem. Once I began understanding how much was going on in people’s lives outside of work, I often felt like it was amazing that we ever got anything done. People, with the best of intentions, often wind up ridiculously overcommitted physically and emotionally.
It happens in subtle ways, one commitment at a time, and as often as not when things beyond our direct control happen to us. We get a good job, doing something valuable and working with people that we care about. We sign up for grad school at night or on the weekends because we figure it will advance our career. We have kids because we understand the significance of family to our lives. Then someone in our family gets sick, and needs our attention. Then someone we care about has financial problems, and needs some of our money. We stop going to the gym because we are too busy. We start having problems sleeping because we are too stressed out. Before we know it, our life has gotten much less simple, and we’re not the person that we used to be.
Here’s the thing. Each decision that we made, on the margin, was totally rational. We had good reasons, both in terms of our self-interest and our conscience, to sign up for each commitment. But when you add them all up, we are just another stressed-out, overworked person sandwiched between aging parents and kids who muddles through too many days in a zombie-like state.
Of course, I don’t just understand this because of my students and people that I worked with. I know this because I have been there myself, big-time, and more often that I care to count.
Long ago, in my first real professional job ever, I worked for an information technology consulting firm. I was recruited by a partner in the firm who had, as far as I could tell, alarming good interpersonal skills. In other words, he could get me to spill out my guts to him, whether or not that was a smart thing to do, every time I landed in his office. One day he asked me some big, penetrating question like “hey Doug, how are things going?” I assumed that he actually wanted to know, probably incorrectly. So, I told him that this work thing was actually more stressful that I thought it was going to be. There was something about the daily grind of having to get up every day and be at work that was wearing on me, and I noticed that, unlike when I was in school, there was not a natural end point where I took test, classes ended, I got a grade, I got a break, and then new classes started. Instead, the problems at work that went unmanaged just got bigger and bigger over time.
After I got done spilling my guts out, unwisely I am sure, the partner in the consulting firm where I was working said something like, “Well, exercise and sleep help.” As far as I was concerned, he might as well have been Einstein inventing the theory of relativity.
Shortly after that I started going running on my lunch hour by the river in downtown Dayton. It was only a three-or-four-mile run, but I noticed it made a difference. I got way more done in the afternoon on the days when I ran at lunch. The harder and longer my ran, the better I seemed to sleep that night.
The Power of Habit
So much of re-energizing ourselves is about changing our habits, and changing our habits is about changing our mindset. Especially in the United States, there is an ethic about working hard that pervades our culture. Throughout my entire career, people liked to brag about how many hours they worked. I once worked for a CEO who used to watch out his top-floor, corner-office window and count exactly how many cars were in the parking lot at 8 am (hardly ever mine) and 6 pm (almost always mine.) It was always fascinating to me how people who self-reported that they were working 60 or 70 hours per week were never actually in the office late at night or on the weekends. Many of the war stories that we told at work were about people working extraordinary hours against crazy deadlines.
Americans work about 140 hours per year more than those in Japan, 24o hour per year more than British workers, and 500 hours per year more than French workers.
To be clear, I’m in favor of hard work. In fact, when it’s not clear what to do next I usually just double down and work harder. My wife thinks that I must be a descendent of the Puritans. But when the tank is empty, when you are out of physical and mental energy, you need to focus on energy and realize that putting in more time isn’t going to make that much difference. We all know in our hearts and minds when we are just punching the clock, when we are physically at work but mentally not there. That’s when we need to step back and do something different, instead of just doubling down.
A crucial point in my own career came when I finally realized that no one, other than myself, was going to solve the energy problem for me.
When I realized this, I was forced to learn how to examine myself, to cultivate an ability to observe my own behavior while I was still in the middle of a situation. I believe that everyone has stress, and that stress can be both productive and unproductive. The butterflies in your stomach before you give a public presentation, or walk into an important meeting, or meet someone you’ve been wanting to meet for the first time- these are natural and productive forms of stress. If you weren’t a little nervous it might mean that you didn’t care enough. These forms of stress get easier to deal with through the actual experience of doing something over and over.
The unproductive stress is the kind that keeps getting in your own way and chronically consuming your energy and enthusiasm for life. For nearly my whole life, when I’ve had difficulty sleeping it means that I’m experiencing unproductive stress. There have been many nights when I didn’t sleep much at all. It’s gotten better, but only when I’ve been able to step back and cultivate new habits. If I eat too much sugar late at night, I wake up in the middle of the night tossing and turning, thinking about all of the things I need to do in the morning. If I go to bed too late, I start to worry too much about sleeping. And as soon as I start worrying about sleep, I create a vicious cycle where I sleep worse.
I realize that not sleeping well when I’m stressed out is something that I have in common with millions of other people. Which is actually the whole point. The more we realize that we have common problems, problems that many before us have encountered, the more we are open to learning the habits that make our lives better.
Good habits come slowly to some of us. Many of us learn these things the hard way. Hard-earned wisdom that comes from living on the planet for a while. Simply mentally noticing what energizes us, and what leaves us energy drained, is the first step.
Like many people, I am more of an introvert than an extrovert. For many years, I organized my work week in basically the same pattern. During the work week, I exercised in the mornings and then stayed late at work. But I rarely worked on a weeknight after I physically left the office. I almost never worked on Saturdays. And I always worked on Sunday mornings, at a local coffee shop. I learned that if I took Saturday off, by Sunday I was full of energy and I usually started my Sunday work session around 7 am.
After a while, I realized that my Sunday work sessions were the most energizing part of my week. I could get an incredible amount of work done when my headphones were on and no one was interrupting me. I have a ridiculous obsession with checking things off of lists, and I got a whole lot of stuff done on those Sunday mornings. By the time I left the coffee shop sometime around noon on Sunday mornings, I would be in a great mood. How weird is that?
What is Your Personal Energy Pattern?
Just like we are all unique people, we also have our own energy patterns. We need to discover them, and that is best done by observing ourselves, perhaps with help with some of those close to us. Some people love to get work done on planes; for others, like me, that’s impossible to do.
There is a certain amount of our time, for most of us, that is beyond our control. Especially for the majority of us who work in organizations. And there are things that drain energy for most people, like long unproductive meetings and people who tend the drain the energy out of the group.
In the last ten years or so, technology and social media have become much more adept at interrupting our flow and interrupting our lives, if we let them. It used to be that we could read one or two magazines a month, and a daily newspaper, and feel that we were informed about our world. We are now only one-click or one-beep away from the latest political crisis, environmental crisis, celebrity meltdown, or mass shooting in America. Whatever gains we may receive from this onslaught of “news,” the onslaught is a disaster for our personal energy equation.
We cannot change all of this easily, but we can try not to be the one running those long unproductive meetings and draining energy from other people. We can recognize that humans aren’t really wired to work 24/7, no matter how many tech devices with irritating-sound-alerts we have. We can learn to take breaks, and we can begin to understand which kinds of breaks work best for us.
We can realize that there are different kinds of energy – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual – and if we pay attention to our own energy needs and deficits, our daily lives will improve. And if our daily lives improve, we will have more energy for what really matters.
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