How are you spending your energy budget?

In my work, I talk a lot about personal energy management  (see this blog post on The Gain-to-Drain Ratio, for example). In many ways, how you manage your energy is how you live your life.

This morning I was looking at the transcript from my M.A.P. Maker podcast featuring Daryn Kagan. In it, she had a great take on her own energy management approach that she describes as choosing how to spend her energy budget.

I do like to talk to people about what I call my energy budget. And just like every business has a financial budget, there’s only so much you can spend, I think every day we each have so many units of energy we can spend as well. And I think it’s really important to decide how you’re going to spend them.

So I don’t really spend a lot of them on critics. And I don’t spend a lot of that on people who tell me why this isn’t going to work. And I think that’s been a really good investment. Because to me, just like that would be throwing money down the drain, I think that’s throwing your energy down the drain as well.

I love that idea. It takes something abstract and creates a concrete concept around it.

Try this: For the rest of the week, pay attention to how you are choosing to spend your energy budget. (You might want to keep track of what you find with an End-of-Day Review.) Where is your energy going? Is it contributing to building the life you want, or are you throwing energy down the drain?

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst