Why time-management techniques fail

May 15

Look at the bookshelf for productivity books and there are thousands, each imploring us to make every moment count, to drive more action into the available time. And there’s great stuff in there but we also know the downside to productivity tools is a slide to the side of everything that’s important to us that isn’t demanding our accountability to others. Physical exercise, diet, family, relationships, friendships and even at work our investment in those we look after all slide to the side in the name of “productivity”.

So here’s another take on things for you to consider. My challenge to you is not to invent time. My challenge to you is not to try to be like the machine you’re not and don’t deserve to be.

Instead I would like you to consider energy. We can’t create time but we can create energy, if we have good strategies and skills. And there are different sources of energy all around us that we can capture, harness to achieve more without dedicating hours we just can’t invent.

So here, offered to you for free is the energy framework I use with my coaching clients.

We start with our core energy, what drives us, what’s important to us, what we want to achieve in our finite lifetime. Our core energy also refers to how we fuel and refuel our physical body and our minds. What we eat, when we eat, when we sleep and how we rest, what our emotional mood is saying to us and how we look after it all have a bearing on our core energy. When we’re up we are at our most awesome. When we’re down, often everything else seems to go adrift.

We shift into creative energy, which isn’t necessarily about your artistic skills but is about sensing opportunity to see things in a different way, options, alternatives and opportunities through both intuition, data and experimentation. Our creative energy allows us to see a landscape of opportunity rather than problems, to use data and intuition to sense our way through challenges. When we’re thrown a curve-ball that threatens to bring us down, our creative energy can come to the rescue.

We shift onwards into connective energy, our power to form collaborative partnerships with people who don’t work for us but with whom we can forge common communities of interests instead of trying to do things alone or believe we are the only ones looking for answers to a question. Trust me, it’s rarely true. Often though we try to solve things alone or believe we’re the only person with this kind of problem. Google tells us that’s nearly always not true. But collaboration doesn’t happen just by accident, we need to develop the art, tools and techniques to find complementary skills and spirits and create the right energy and signals that encourage people to want to combine their energies with ours for explosive effect.

And then onwards into catalytic energy. Most leaders will argue the case for more staff, more people to achieve more things. But in most workplaces, most leaders only ever get a fraction of the available energy (not time) from their people because they are not asking the right questions to gain access to all of the talents available. How many of us within the workplace would love to have 50% more people on our teams, how much more could we get done? Yet research shows in many workplaces most people at best whilst working incredibly long hours only feel their bosses use a fraction of the skills they have to offer. Developing an intuition for generating catalytic energy helps us as leaders and also has the most infectious positive effect on team morale and helping younger leaders develop too.

And in the same way when we arrive at work having fallen out of bed in the morning and everyone tries to avoid us (this is catabolic energy) generating catalytic energy means we instead naturally attract the energy of others who also want to achieve great things.

Want to generate more energy without working hours you don’t have and can’t invent? Simply stop trying to bend the laws of time and doing it all yourself. Follow this podcast series and learn to become an Energy Leader.

Ever felt there’s never enough hours in the day to get everything done, overwhelmed, exhausted and never quite achieving what you want? Time is finite, but energy is not.

I help exhausted leaders master personal energy, creativity, collaboration & teamwork; reclaiming a day every week to spend on the things and the people you love most

From days that drift, to days by design.

To learn more and make things happen for you here's three simple ways:

1. Subscribe to this blog at ianbrowne.com and get weekly tips to master your energy levels & be a better leader

2. Sign up to my podcast here https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-energy-leader/id1597638348