The Energy Audit: Where Is Your Energy Actually Going?

You already know you are tired. This is how you find out why.

Ask a tired woman what is wearing her out and she will usually say "everything." Work, the house, the kids, her parents, the general volume of life. It is an honest answer and a useless one, because you cannot change "everything."

The truth is almost always more specific. A few particular things are taking far more than they appear to, and a few small things are giving back more than you realize. You just cannot see them, because you have never looked at your days in that way.

An energy audit is a way of looking. It takes three days and a piece of paper, and it replaces "everything" with a short list you can act on.

Why energy, not time

Most advice about being overloaded is about time: schedule better, wake earlier, batch your errands. The trouble is that time is fixed and you are already using all of it.

Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy made this argument in a well-known Harvard Business Review article. Their case is that time is fixed, but energy is different: it can be systematically expanded and renewed. They describe four sources of it.

• Body: sleep, food, movement, rest.

• Emotions: the quality of your mood, and how you handle stress.

• Mind: your ability to focus on one thing.

• Spirit: a sense of meaning and purpose in what you are doing.

They tested the idea with 106 employees at Wachovia Bank, who went through a program built around small energy-renewing rituals. Compared with a control group, participants did better on revenue measures, and 71 percent said the program had a noticeable or substantial positive effect on their productivity and performance.

You are not a bank branch. But the four-part model is a handy lens, because it explains something a time log cannot: why an hour of one thing leaves you flat and an hour of another leaves you fine.

Your memory of your day is not reliable

Here is the reason to write things down instead of just thinking it over.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and colleagues developed a technique called the Day Reconstruction Method. Instead of asking people in general terms how they feel about their lives, it has them rebuild the previous day as a sequence of episodes, like scenes in a film, and rate how they felt during each one.

When 909 employed women did this, the results held some surprises. According to a summary of the study, published in Science, relaxing with friends topped the enjoyment scale, followed by lunch with coworkers. "Being with one's boss and commuting alone anchored the low end."

Two other findings stand out. "Sleep quality had a large effect on the enjoyment of life," the researchers reported, and the effect of time pressure on enjoying work was also very large.

The lesson for your audit is that general impressions blur the details. You may believe your job drains you when it is really the commute and one weekly meeting. You may believe evenings are your rest when they are actually ninety minutes of scrolling that leaves you worse. Going episode by episode shows you what is true.

How to run the audit

Pick three ordinary days. Two workdays and one day off is ideal. You are sampling real life, so skip the unusual week.

Step 1: Log the day in episodes

At three points, around lunch, late afternoon, and before bed, list what you did since the last check-in as a series of episodes. An episode is anything with a start and an end: the school run, a meeting, making dinner, a phone call with your mother, twenty minutes on your phone.

Keep it brief. Aim for ten to fifteen episodes a day.

Step 2: Score each one

Next to each episode, write a number from -2 to +2 for how you felt afterward.

• Score: +2

  • Meaning: Clearly restored. I had more afterward than before.

• Score: +1

  • Meaning: Slightly better

• Score: 0

  • Meaning: Neutral

• Score: -1

  • Meaning: A bit depleted

• Score: -2

  • Meaning: Drained. I needed to recover from it.

Score the after-feeling, not whether the thing was worthwhile. Helping your father with his paperwork may be both important and a -2. Both facts belong on the page.

Step 3: Tag the type of energy

For each episode, and at least for anything scoring -2 or +2, add a letter for which source it touched: B for body, E for emotions, M for mind, S for spirit.

A day of back-to-back interruptions is an M drain. An argument is an E drain. Work that feels pointless is an S drain. Skipping lunch is a B drain. A walk might be +2 on B and M at once.

Step 4: Add one line about context

Note who you were with and whether you chose the activity. These two details often explain the score better than the activity itself.

A sample afternoon might look like this:

• Episode: Team meeting, 60 min

  • Score: -1

  • Type: M

  • Note: Camera on, nothing for me to do

• Episode: Lunch at desk, answering email

  • Score: -2

  • Type: B, M

  • Note: Did not choose it

• Episode: Walk to pharmacy

  • Score: +2

  • Type: B, M

  • Note: Alone, outside

• Episode: Call from sister

  • Score: -2

  • Type: E

  • Note: Third crisis call this week

• Episode: Cooking dinner, podcast on

  • Score: +1

  • Type: M

  • Note: Chose the recipe

• Episode: Phone in bed, 50 min

  • Score: -1

  • Type: B

  • Note: Meant to read

Reading your results

After three days, lay the pages side by side and look for patterns. Five questions will get you most of the way.

1. What are your top three drains? Circle the episodes that scored -2 more than once.

2. What are your top three restorers? Circle the repeating +2s. They are often small and easy to overlook.

3. Which energy type is most in the red? Count the letters next to your -2s. A cluster of M drains calls for a different fix than a cluster of E drains.

4. Where is the fake rest? Find the things you do in order to unwind that scored 0 or below.

5. What is drained by context, not content? The same task can score differently depending on who is there and whether you chose it.

Question four deserves attention. Researchers Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz, who study how people recover from work, identified four experiences that make off-hours restorative:

• Psychological detachment: mentally switching off from work, not just leaving the building.

• Relaxation: low-effort, pleasant activity.

• Mastery: something absorbing and a little challenging that you get better at, like a hobby or a class.

• Control: deciding for yourself how your free time is spent.

Hold your evenings up against that list. Collapsing on the sofa while half-monitoring work messages has none of the four. It looks like rest and does not act like it. Mastery in particular surprises people: sometimes what restores you is not doing less, but doing something that is yours.

Turn the audit into three changes

Do not redesign your life. Make three moves.

Shrink one drain. Take your worst repeating -2 and ask whether it can be shortened, shared, rescheduled, or done differently. If the drain is a person's crisis calls, it might be a time limit. If it is desk lunches, it might be twenty minutes somewhere else.

Protect one restorer. Take your most reliable +2 and give it a fixed place in the week. Treat it as an appointment. If a ten-minute walk scores +2 every time, it has earned a slot.

Cushion one unavoidable drain. Some -2s are staying: the commute, the care task, the weekly meeting. Schwartz and McCarthy point out that our bodies run in cycles of roughly 90 to 120 minutes and need a break between them, and that even a few minutes of real disengagement helps. Put a short recovery right after the thing that costs the most.

Then check the body column before blaming anything else. The CDC recommends seven or more hours of sleep for adults aged 18 to 60. Given how strongly sleep colored the women's days in Kahneman's study, a run of short nights may be lowering every score on your page.

What the audit will not fix

An audit shows you where your energy goes. It cannot make more hours, and it cannot fix exhaustion that has a medical cause.

If you are getting enough sleep and are still worn out for weeks, or your tiredness comes with low mood, loss of interest, or other symptoms, please see a doctor. Persistent fatigue has many possible causes, and it deserves a proper look, not just a better routine.

Try this today

1. Log this afternoon. Tonight, list the episodes since lunch and score each from -2 to +2. One half-day is enough to start seeing the pattern.

2. Name one fake rest. Identify one thing you do to unwind that leaves you no better, and try swapping it tomorrow for something from the four recovery experiences.

3. Schedule one +2. Put your most reliable restorer in your calendar for a specific time this week.

Your energy is going somewhere. You are allowed to decide where.

Sources

• Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy, "Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time," Harvard Business Review (republished by the American Association for Physician Leadership)

• ScienceDaily, summary of Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz & Stone, the Day Reconstruction Method, Science (2004)

• Sonnentag & Fritz, "The Recovery Experience Questionnaire," Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (2007), University of Konstanz repository

• CDC, "About Sleep"