Have you ever looked at your calendar on a Sunday night and felt tired and realized you are already behind?
You have days filled with back-to-back meetings. You have scheduled some focus time, although you know it will be eaten by “unexpected” urgent tasks.
Maybe you even have tried a few productivity hacks, like waking up an hour early to start a big project, or declining unnecessary meetings, or protecting your time for “deep work.” On paper, you manage your time perfectly.
Yet, despite your discipline, you're spent by 3 PM in the afternoon. The decisions you had to make felt harder than they should. You stay up late to finish the critical document, but the words come out slow. You wake up early to clear your inbox, but by the time the hard problems land at 10 AM, you feel like you've already done a full day’s work.
Most of us have been trained to think that adding time is the answer. When things feel stressful, we sacrifice sleep, skip lunch, or cancel exercise. We treat our day like a math problem where more minutes always equals more output.
But the math is wrong. An hour of exhausted, dull thinking at 7 PM in the evening is not the same as an hour of sharp focus at 10 in the morning.
You ran out of fuel and not the time.
Time Scarcity Management
More time is the obvious solution. After all, time is your most valuable resource. But that is a common lie managers (and not only) fall for.
When you feel overwhelmed, you don’t question the quality of your work. Instead you question the quantity of your time.
We are so obsessed with optimizing the 24 hour container that we ignore the quality of the resource we put into it.
This leads to behaviors that feel right but actively make you less effective. Here are few examples I’ve done, I bet they sound familiar:
Pulling a late night to "get ahead," but the next day, you end up spending at least 2 hours fixing the low-quality work from last night.
Skipping the 30-minute walk, but then losing focus every 15 minutes during the critical afternoon meeting.
Using my sharpest morning hours clearing inbox, and leaving my afternoon hours, to “depleted me” to handle the major strategic problem.
These behaviors might feel productive. Cutting sleep feels like dedication. Skipping a meal feels like efficiency. But by the time you sit down to tackle the complex thinking you saved time for, your brain is running on fumes.
To me that just looks like a pretty low return on investment.
Manage Your Fuel Tank
Your real constraint isn’t time. It’s energy.
Energy management gives you control. It's the practice of finding, storing, and using your physical, emotional, and mental fuel where it counts most.
When you manage your energy, you realize that an hour of deep work in the morning, when you’re fed, focused, and recovered, is worth four fragmented, depleted hours in the late evening.
Trying to squeeze more minutes out of the workday won't work in the long run. Your focus should be making sure your brain has the fuel it needs for the hardest decisions.
And in order to do so, you have to audit your fuel tank.
Your Energy Audit
First off, to do your initial energy audit you don’t need an app or a fancy coach. The goal here is to identify your peak and low energy times so you can match the right task to the right energy state.
To start, remember that your energy comes from four main places:
Physical (your body, sleep, and nutrition)
Emotional (your mood, stress, and connection to others)
Mental (your focus and clarity)
Purpose (your sense of meaning and alignment)
I will dive deep into how to optimize these four resources in a future newsletter, but for now, this will be good enough.
Step 1: Map your work and energy
For one week track your physical and mental energy level every 1 - 2 hours (or 3x per day, or whatever suits you). But DON'T CHANGE YOUR SCHEDULE. The purpose is to observe your current situation and learn from it.
You can use a simple notebook and note down the following (example below):
Time | Energy Level Rate 1-5 (1 = hungry/tired, 5 = ready to go) | Mental focus Rate 1-5 (1 = low/distracted, 5 = sharp focus) | Current task What were you doing? |
9 am | 5 | 5 | Writing strategic doc (High) |
11 am | 4 | 3 | Team 1:1 |
1 pm | 2 | 2 | Inbox cleanup |
3 pm | 3 | 2 | Budget review |
Step 2: Review and adapt
Based on your findings you can start moving your tasks to match your mental state and energy. Ideally it should look something like this:
Peak Energy for Deep Work. (Strategy, complex writing, hard decisions).
Mid Energy for Collaborative Work. (1:1s, team updates, non-critical meetings).
Low Energy for Admin and Easy Tasks. (Simple email clearing, scheduling, data entry).
And I know this is a very simplified approach and it’s not always possible to skip Budget call with senior leadership, because it doesn't match your peak hour, but you can still do this with the tasks that are fully in your control.
Very long P.S. Sometimes just fixing your own calendar is not enough. You have to defend it. I used to have a peer who loved calling for "quick" brainstorming sessions on late Friday afternoons. After a few of these sessions, I pointed out (politely) the low ROI of asking depleted people to be creative, and he stopped.
If that fails, book a fake meeting. I use a recurring block called "Housekeeping" every Friday afternoon. It's just a placeholder, but it's a giant, immovable “NO” to anyone trying to book time when the fuel tank is low.
Good luck out there. See you next Tuesday.