More Time Hacks: Manage Your Spiritual & Emotional Energy

In a continuous, always-on culture, it’s easy to keep on working, working, and working without relaxing. Have you ever felt that you were on a treadmill that just kept going? You keep running, and running, and the treadmill keeps spinning.

Arianna Huffington worked 18-hour days building the Huffington Post website. One day, in 2007, she fell, woke up in a pool of blood.

After weeks of medical tests, her doctors simply said she was exhausted. From NBC News, Paul Raeburn reported on Huffington’s burnout:

It's not just famous workaholics like Huffington, or celebrities like Paula Deen, Lindsay Lohan or Demi Moore who can't function because of exhaustion. Extreme tiredness and lack of sleep is experienced by regular people, too — and we should know when it's getting dangerous to our health.

What’s fascinating is that stress and insomnia go hand in hand. When this article was written, we were emerging from The Great Recession of 2008, and stress led to sleep issues:

At least 78 percent of American adults say their stress level increased or stayed the same over the past five years, with 33 percent saying their stress levels are affecting their mental health, according to a recent report from the American Psychological Association. Almost half of adults say stress has caused bouts of insomnia within the past month, the APA report found.

I myself felt — and still do feel — that so much of my focus is on being productive. Being surrounded by Advanced Placement students in high school, high achievers in college, then even more superstars in the medical profession, reinforces this compulsive craving for continued productivity.

And, in the spirit of continuous improvement, I enrolled in business school in hopes of improving myself — and my desire to overcome imposter syndrome!

We’ve reviewed ways to hack your physical energy and your mental energy in a previous article. Here are two remaining time hacks covered by authors Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy in the Harvard Business Review’s “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time.”

Hack Your Spiritual Energy

Let’s look at their recommendations to nourish your spirit:

• Identify your “sweet spot” activities — those that give you feelings of effectiveness, effortless absorption, and fulfillment. Find ways to do more of these.
• Allocate time and energy to what you consider most important. For example, spend the last 20 minutes of your evening commute relaxing, so you can connect with your family once you’re home.
• Live your core values. For instance, if consideration is important to you but you’re perpetually late for meetings, practice intentionally showing up five minutes early for meetings.

Follow your passion

You should do what fulfills you, makes you feel effective, and is effortless.

I remember a speech by Felice Gersh, MD at the UC Irvine Merage School of Business. She shared her story on how dealing with bureaucracy made her incredibly frustrated. This led to her launching her own business — Integrative Medical Group — incorporating her interests in integrative, complementary, and alternative medicine along with her background as an OB/GYN.

At UCSF — the University of California, San Francisco — I met John Chamberlain, MD, an attending physician who did a surgery residency. This means that he did many grueling years of training in the operating room and hospitals.

But, he changed his mind, and then became a psychiatrist, running the Consult & Liaison service at Langley Porter Hospital, and pursuing his passion in forensic psychiatry.

What prompted such a drastic career change — from surgery to psychiatry?

Looking at the medical field, many seasoned physicians advise medical students early on in their training, “Oh, you’ll find your [medical] specialty in your third year. It’s too early to do that.”

I disagree. I think it’s absolutely important to identify your “sweet spot” early on, and not wait until it’s too late to change.

Round the world and home again
That’s the sailor’s way
Faster faster, faster faster

There’s no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There’s no knowing where we’re rowing
Or which way the river’s flowing

... Yes, the danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they’re certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing

– ‘Wondrous Boat Ride’, from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

How does this apply to your life? If you can’t make some sort of plan or know where you’re going, you might set yourself up for failure! It’s important to plan, but also adapt to where the river of your life is taking you.

Going back to the medical field, if you find your passion lies in a competitive field like dermatology, you might not even get to pursue your passion at all.

So always, ALWAYS, explore, learn, to discover your sweet spot.

Once you’ve found it, don’t let it go.

Dan Kennedy wrote similarly in his book No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs,

“Fight to link everything to your long-term goals.”

Kennedy says that part of being successful is learning how to say “no” to opportunities that may sound good, but aren’t linked with your long-term goals.

Time for what’s important

What’s important for you? One executive hated doing sales reports. He decided to delegate them to someone who loved that activity.

If you don’t know what your time is worth, you can’t expect the world to know it either. Know what your time is worth by calculating your base earnings target for next year, divided by the work hours in a year. This roughly shows you how much you can earn a year.

Use that number to judge whether a project or a task is worth your time.

I remember a physician telling me how she spent hours cleaning her own house, but it frustrated her and she didn’t want to expend that much of her energy. She was reluctant to hire a housekeeper, but she decided that she wanted to free up her time.

Time is money. And sometimes, money can free up time: online shopping surcharges, grocery delivery surcharges, airplanes over bus trips, and outsourcing of tasks may be more financially expensive, but time well spent.

Delegate, delegate, delegate.

Make yourself replaceable so that you can train someone else to do what you are doing. That way, you can move on to do other projects, something you may be passionate about. But you can still oversee the work as a manager and leader.

Live your core values

“If consideration is important to you but you’re perpetually late for meetings, practice intentionally showing up five minutes early for meetings.”

Dan Kennedy similarly writes in No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs:

“Punctuality provides personal power... [it’s a very] simple way to favorably impress others.”

Dan Kennedy’s argument: be punctual so that you can demand the same punctuality from other people. Punctuality and integrity are linked: people who can’t be punctual can’t be trusted. This is one way to demand that others be cognizant of your time.

Spending time wisely is one of my core values. I actually have spent a lot of money on public transit instead of driving a car. I consider it a great waste of time to be sitting in traffic and driving — plus, audiobooks don’t work for me as I’m a visual learner. I’d rather take buses and trains as I can read books and process emails at the same time.

I also bike as it knocks out three goals at once: commuting, burning calories, and keeping the environment clean. Bicycling gives me more energy to accomplish my goals.

Kennedy further writes that “Self-discipline is MAGNETIC.” His argument is that if you can control yourself, you can execute. If you clearly detail your expectations, and don’t make exceptions for yourself, your energy will be well-spent. For me, I stick to 1-hour-a-day of writing with no exceptions. This is especially important “because the entrepreneur is his own boss and can do as he pleases with his time.”

Hack Your Emotional Energy

We’ve looked at managing spiritual, mental, and physical energy. Finally, Schwartz and McCarthy provide ways to hack your emotional energy:

• Pause and take a breath to defuse negative emotions, like irritability, impatience, anxiety, insecurity.
• Fuel positive emotions in yourself and in others by regularly expressing appreciation to them — with detailed, specific gratitude — through notes, emails, calls, or conversations.
• Look at upsetting situations through new lenses. Adopt a “reverse lens,” “long lens” and “wide lens.”

Feel bad? Mad? Take a deep breath.

Renewing emotional energy is harder to accomplish in high-stress, high-stakes jobs. Think of a rapidly-growing startup founder, putting out multiple fires. Or, imagine the operating room as a surgeon or an anesthesiologist. This stress can be a powerful motivator.

Stress is funny though. Too much stress and negative emotions can lead us to expend all our energy, overwhelm, and destroy us.

As stressed professionals, we need to keep ourselves emotionally-centered. Those dealing with stress take time to do something a little different. I’ve witnessed — in high-stakes settings — great de-stressing techniques:

• A chief resident physician spent his off-duty hours to bake desserts for his team — bringing up team morale.
• A Chief Medical Officer of a biotech startup started baking and posting photos of Instagram when her clinical trial work worsened.
• Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, stay-at-home employees in San Francisco baked sourdough bread, those in Italy sang songs, and those in New York City clapped nightly for frontline heroes, all in efforts to defuse stress.

Take a pause to breathe deeply and shift attention to something positive and pleasing. This interrupts stress. And, it gives us more energy to tackle the next challenge.

Express gratitude

I’ve been in workplaces where coworkers complain, complain, and complain. To top it off, there was also a steady, never-ending stream of negative gossip. This led to a toxic environment — and is highly unproductive.

Instead, I think of others’ strengths. Things I appreciate about others.

And, when feeling down, I think about what I’m good at, instead of what I’m bad at. You may have felt this way too: it’s all too easy to compare yourself to others.

Regular meditative thoughts on how fortunate we are to be in a position to help others — despite the lawsuits, the pressure, and so forth — can replenish our emotional reserves. Checking in with peer support groups advances those feelings, improving our energy levels.

We tend to dwell on negative emotions when they arise. This is normal.

Interrupt the cycle of negative emotions. Deliberately make time for positive emotions, expressing appreciation, and gratitude. Spend about 10 minutes a day, for a week, thinking of 3 things that went well. Write these down, and even before bed, to set the tone for quality sleep. For more techniques, the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley provides a step-by-step guide on how to express gratitude daily.

Different lenses

The saying “Walk a mile in their shoes?” encourages us to view difficult, upsetting situations in different ways:

• Reverse lens — “What would the other person in this conflict say, and how might he be right?”
• Long lens — “How will I likely view this situation in six months?”
• Wide lens — “How can I grow and learn from this situation?”

Let’s think about a situation. Imagine that your supervisor has lashed out at both you and your coworkers. Your supervisor is angry that a task isn’t getting done, and they publicly say mean, humiliating things to your face.

Then, you notice that your peers are all smiling, nodding ... all the while continuing to work on their computers!

I witnessed this happen in medical school: for a four-week rotation, junior physicians took control of their emotional energy, let go of their ego, and kept a distance from heated emotions as an infamous, angry supervisor yelled at them.

These strong junior physicians, in the midst of a busy internal medicine hospitalist service, battled a never-ending stream of paperwork, mountains of documentation, complex and buggy computer systems that required 20 clicks for the simplest tasks, and insurance companies who wanted to eject their patients from the hospital. Never had I seen so much yelling, cursing, and fist-pounding by leaders at all levels.

So I marveled at these junior doctors’ ability to stay calm. I asked one of the doctors, “Why would you just sit there and take this abuse?”

He replied that he still powers through each day was so that he could learn more internal medicine, while he can still get the supervision. He viewed the experience as an opportunity. With this shift in views, he realized he wanted, not needed, to stay engaged for this four-week rotation.

Thus, he viewed a difficult situation through the wide lens — to find how he could grow and learn from the work environment despite the abuse.

And, he additionally viewed this through a long lens — thinking about this situation in six months, this rotation would be only a brief four weeks. The long-term gain is worth the short-term pain.

(Ultimately, the verbal abuse at this medical school, among other factors, later culminated in unionization of resident physicians. The union is represented by CIR/SEIU, or Service Employee International Union.)

Tying the hacks all together

If we’ve learned anything, there’s no one way to hack our time and energy. In fact, these suggestions all lend themselves to great life experiments that you can slowly try in time. All together, it’s a great way to spend your energy.

My hope is that, by sharing these stories, you feel better and more confident. I hope that you get on the right track to your peak success, productivity, and maximum happiness. Perhaps those are just a few things to lead to true fulfillment.

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