Four Time Hacks: Manage Your Physical & Mental Energy

One of my favorite magazines is the Harvard Business Review, which features articles on personal improvement, business leadership, and productivity. These articles analyze successful organizations, interviews with leaders, and surveys of executives.

One such article that caught my eye, “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” was republished in On Managing Yourself.

I loved this article. Instead of stressing about time management, they focus on energy management.

What are the different types of personal energy? Physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Let’s go over each one:

Hack Your Physical Energy

Authors Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy recommend:

Enhance your sleep by going to bed earlier and reducing alcohol use.
Reduce stress with cardiovascular exercise three times a week and strength training once a week.
Eat small meals and light snacks every three hours.
Learn to notice signs of low energy, such as restlessness, yawning, hunger, and difficulty concentrating.
Take brief but regular breaks away from your desk, at 90- to 120- minute intervals throughout the day.

Enhance your sleep

Shifting my sleep schedule earlier gives me breathing room to process e-mails, write articles, and read papers without interruption. I sleep early and wake up early. Being awake early in the morning — with no other interruptions — is calming.

Typically, the end of the day is not great. I can’t concentrate at the end of the day. In fact, I used to come home from the hospital — where I worked — and sleep almost immediately.

Even if I’m able to muster the energy to work at the end of the day, continuing to work at home leads me to feel even more stressed! I can’t even go to sleep. After 10 minutes, I would use hypnosis videos on YouTube, play a looping sound clip of ocean waves on my computer, or — as a last resort — take melatonin supplements.

I certainly do avoid alcohol. Even though it’s sedating, I can’t even drink alcohol without unpleasant effects! Plus, many people find it challenging to stop drinking alcohol entirely. Here, seeking medical treatment and addiction counseling can help.

Check out more of how I optimize sleep and hack energy in “How to Hack Sleep” on Mental Power Hacks.

Exercise time reduces stress

The authors recommend doing cardiovascular exercise at least three times a week, and strength training at least once a week.

Throughout school and in my first few years in the working world, I had few funds and little time to hit the gym. So, I used resistance bands and weights at home. I would use my workouts as an opportunity to catch up on late-night comedy on another monitor. I did invest in comfortable shoes with orthotics — Ecco leather shoes — to get the most out of walking up and down stairs, as an alternative to elevators.

And, when I began my working career, I invested in a decent bicycle to commute to and from work. This helped me reduce my carbon footprint, exercised the largest muscles in the body — my thighs, quadriceps, and gluteals — allowing me to burn more calories. Talk about multi-tasking!

I later invested in an unlimited gym membership with robust group fitness courses. With this, I was able to hit the gym wherever I traveled. And, because the gym used the same choreography, I could easily follow music and choreography for strength training.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has caused me to avoid the gym — a place where people gather and breathe heavily with a potential to spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus — I’m able to continue these group fitness classes with Android and Chromecast apps. One I use is Les Mills On Demand. There are many services available. Apple Fitness, Beachbody, and Peloton all let you work out safely from home.

Exercise will reduce stress, boosts energy and stamina, and increases your work productivity. There are many reasons why employers offer exercise benefits!

Eat small meals and snacks every three hours

Keeping small meals and light snacks can fuel busy, working professionals — especially if you are working from home!

When I worked in the hospital, I would eat a huge breakfast to get my energy going, then avoid heavy foods for lunch to avoid tiredness. I regularly kept power bars in my white coat to munch on, power through long meetings, to avoid major hunger and binging later on.

Now, I primarily work in an office setting. I bring small coolers with me with zero-calorie carbonated drinks to keep me hydrated. I also always have a reusable large tub of salad with toppings, 2 Greek yogurt cups, and 2 protein snack bars.

Know when your energy’s low

Learn to notice the signs that your energy is about to crash. This can include feeling restless, yawning, hunger, and difficulty concentrating.

This especially can happen with meetings. Some key tips to help optimize meetings:

set meetings before lunch or the end of the work day, encouraging brevity and conciseness amongst participants
don’t serve refreshments as it adds more idle time to a meeting
have an agenda ready in advance
have clear goals for the meeting.

Take time for brief, regular breaks

Take brief, but regular, breaks away from your desk. Do this at 90- to 120- minute intervals throughout the day. This helps boost your energy, reset your concentration, so you can tackle another time block of work.

This is naturally easier if you are in control of your schedule. If you rely on an administrative clerk or an executive assistant, providing rules and guidelines for scheduling the way you want can help you build in these breaks.

In my Hack Productivity course, we’ll uncover the magic of brief, regular breaks using my 25-and-5 Time Block method.

Hack Your Mental Energy

Schwartz and McCarthy further recommend:

Reduce interruptions by performing high-concentration tasks away from interruptors and distractors.
Respond to voicemails and emails at designated times during the day.
Every night, identify the most important challenge for the next day. Then make it your first priority when you arrive at work in the morning.

Work without time for interruptions

Reduce interruptions by deliberately performing more intensive tasks away from distractions, interruptions, and time-wasters. This means smartphones, e-mails, social media, and anything that rings or vibrates.

But if you work in a high-stress, high-interruption environment, isn’t finding a quiet place impossible?

In the hospital wards, I found it challenging to concentrate on work due to constant interruptions. People may page you or message you. I noticed that the more efficient physicians would enter in orders, write notes, and present cases — essentially multitasking — during morning rounds, a place where physicians would meet to discuss patient care.

The point that the authors try to make is to emphasize how important it is to reduce clutter. It reminds me of what I read from one psychiatrist, Edward Hallowell M.D., about something called “attention deficit trait”:

“The pace of most people’s lives these days induces [attention deficits]. We’ve never seen in human history the technology that we have today. I think it’s basically technology driven. Why are we doing it? The short answer is because we can—because we can transmit so much information, we do. Because we can access so much information, we do. Because we can sign up for so many tasks, we do.

“Throw in global competition, job insecurity and all the other fears driving people today and the next thing you know, you get the phenomenon of [attention deficit trait].”

Dr. Hallowell writes that you might find these traits with “distractibility, restlessness, a sense of ‘gotta go, gotta rush, gotta run around’ and impulsive decision-making, because you have so many things to do.”

Psychologist Nir Eyal also writes about this in Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life:

“Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done. Why does it feel like we’re distracting our lives away?”

Deliberately setting up time and environments away from distractions can help you accomplish what you want. Which brings us one technique that can help:

Process requests, impromptu meetings, and messages during specific times of the day

One way to reduce intrusions into your consciousness is to designate specific times where people can interrupt you, and specific times when they can’t. This is especially helpful for voicemails and emails at designated times during the day.

This is also why I triage emails. I try not to answer some people’s emails instantaneously, and instead reply at least a day later.

Many work cultures allow “WFH” days — Working From Home — to save 90-120 minutes off commuting, stay at home, and just focus on a particular project or task. With the COVID-19 pandemic requiring office workers to stay at home, WFH has become essential.

If others absolutely insist on intruding on your designated time, make it even more clear by being unavailable. Set your instant messaging status to Away. Place an out-of-office (OOO) message. Close the door to your office.

“Be busy and be obvious about it,” writes marketing author Dan Kennedy. “If they can’t find you, they can’t interrupt you.”

Kennedy’s book No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs even recommends to not have an open-door policy for C-suite executives, as it invites interruptions. He goes even further and recommends to not carry a cell phone.

But if people must speak with you, set a time limit on your conversation up front (“I have a meeting in 15 minutes but I can speak with you now,” or “I’m very busy at the moment, but I can speak with you at 4pm for 20 minutes.”).

Kennedy writes:

“Time Vampires will suck as much blood out of you as you permit.”

Adopt delegation techniques: train people to either ask someone else, or ask you questions in a succinct, concise manner. This can help prevent “time vampires” from consuming your time.

Park your worries for the next day

Every night, identify the most important challenge for the next day. This helps reduce your dwelling on a problem, or worrying about an issue. Place these challenges in a trusted space — say, your calendar or your to-do list.

Then go through your Pre-Sleep Routine, as I wrote in “How to Hack Sleep” on Mental Power Hacks. This routine helps you sleep, thus replenishing your Mental Energy for the next day.

Finally, the next morning, you can make these challenges your first priority at work!

Combine all these techniques, and you’ll have a lot more sleep, more energy, and can process challenges quicker.

Manage your emotional & spiritual energy

We’ve gone over two key ways to hack your time, to help you manage your energy and boost your productivity. These tips can transform the way you think and act on your time, optimizing each day.

In the next article, we’ll look at two other key ways: hacking your emotional energy — to keep negative emotions at bay. And, ways to hack your spiritual energy, to help you stay true to your values and your passion.

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