There are two skills that run quietly under every working life. This week I'm covering the second skill: intentional time and energy management. [Last week was emotional intelligence. If you missed it, you can find it here.]
Most people have some version of time management: a calendar, systems, blocks for focused work. The piece most people are missing is the intentional part: asking whether the work that gets your best hours is the work that warrants them. Most of us fill the available space and call it planned. Intentional time management is the practice of asking harder questions about what goes in the week.
Energy is the other resource, and it's the one almost nobody is actively tracking.
Time is finite and visible; you can account for it, rearrange it, get some back when you move a meeting. A decision about time is always a decision about energy. Booking a draining call for your best creative hours costs more than the hour on your calendar. Saying yes because you have the hours for it, without asking whether you have the energy, costs more than the time.
Boundaries sit right underneath both of these, and yes, I know you saw this coming after last week. They're critical in managing both your time and your energy, and every broken boundary is a withdrawal from both.
Decisions are where this comes to a head. When your time and energy are depleted, so is your judgment, and most of us are making our most important calls right at that low point: in between back-to-back calls or the end of a long day.
I spent a long time treating open space in my calendar as something to be filled. A full schedule felt like evidence I was doing the work. What I had to unlearn was that the white space was doing something too. Contemplation needs room. The walk you take after a hard call, the morning you don't schedule to the edges, the Friday afternoon you protect instead of trading away for one more commitment: those are the conditions under which your clearest thinking gets done, where a decision you've been circling finally lands, where you figure out what you think before you have to act on it. A packed schedule spends both resources at once: the energy that gets you through the day and the space that lets you think clearly about what matters.
Hi! I’m Carrie. I believe doing good work and living the life you want are not in conflict. If you’re ready to build that way, reply to this email or see how we can work together.
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