Energy efficiency: The Power of Prioritizing your Energy
Taking care of my energy is my number one priority because, without it, I wouldn’t be able to help anyone else. However, many people aren’t aware of the “energy vampires” in their lives, which can often be persons or subtle things.
In the context of business, these can be tasks that we’re good at but that aren’t in our zone of genius. When we do them, our energy is drained and we feel tired or uncreative afterward. It’s easy to blame these feelings on something else, like a bad lunch, but often it’s the task itself that’s to blame.
By prioritizing our energy and doing the most challenging tasks when we’re feeling most energetic, we can achieve optimal performance and avoid burnout.
To gain a deeper understanding of how our energy flows throughout the day, and how you can start prioritizing your energy, one useful tool is the concept of Chrono Energy Type, which I developed while working with my clients prior to the pandemic.
Chrono biology refers to the 24-hour clock within our body, including hormone and temperature cycles that are influenced by daylight and night. While a test can determine your Chrono Biology type, I found that it didn’t fully resonate with me, so I went deeper and created the Chrono-Energy Type.
If you’re curious about your Chrono Energy Type, you can take the free quiz here, and take the result as an indicator rather than a definitive answer.
The results will take you through an optimal daily flow, including your natural wake-up time and energy levels throughout the day. Based on the results, I suggest activities that are best suited to your energy level and how you recover energy throughout the day.
By following your Chrono Energy Type, you can achieve a much more stable energy flow. On the other hand, if you ignore your natural energy flow and try to force activities that don’t align with your type, your energy will likely crash more frequently.
I have many clients who implemented their Chrono Energy Type into their life and business, and they saved 25% of working hours. This is because the brain suddenly could do the hardest and most important tasks in high-energy phases and in the lower-energy phases, the ones that are not so important.
The best part is that you can actually make more money without working harder than you already do. At first, there might be a little dip in income as you shift and transition to this new approach, but once you break through and get into the flow, you’ll actually make more money because you’ll feel more rested, recovered, and energized.
You’ll be able to use your brain to its full potential, which means you’ll get more things done and have the creativity and capacity you need.
The problem is, many people are afraid of making this shift because it goes against everything we’ve been taught by the hustle and grind culture.
We’ve been bombarded by online gurus telling us that we have to work harder, faster, and longer to be successful. So, it’s understandable that it can be hard to believe that we can achieve more by prioritizing our energy instead of constantly pushing ourselves to do more. But trust me, it’s possible and it’s worth it.
How to Increase your Well-being and Productivity
If you want to start prioritizing your energy, and increasing your productivity and therefore well-being you will need to take care of a few things.
First of all, your caffeine intake is a really important thing.
I used to drink 2 liters of coffee. I ran on coffee. Now, I am 12 years sober from coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol.
Coffee has a half-life of between 5 to 10 hours depending on how many milligrams you have. So you drink a coffee and 8 hours later you still have half of the coffee inside of your body.
People think that they will be fine if they have a coffee after lunch but even if you don’t notice the effects of coffee on your awakeness, your body has to still get rid of it and it will take a total of 12 to 15 hours to get rid of it completely.
It impacts your sleep so much that sometimes you cannot go into the proper deep sleep phase that you need to get rid of all the waste on your brain and detox it for the night. So the next morning you wake up and you still have the waste left from the day before and you repeat this every day.
And then you ask yourself why you have brain fog, why you are not resting, why you forget things, why you don’t feel energized. This is because you keep doing this over and over again, and you never detox your brain.
If you want to have a good rest at night, you need to drink your last coffee before 12 PM.
Try not to drink more than 1 coffee a day and if you can, make it decaf.
If you want to learn more about how to get energy without caffeine and the effects of coffee on the body, you can read this blog post.
The second point is hydration.
Your brain needs a lot of water to properly function. If you don’t have water your body just stops running. And I am not talking about soda with sugar because they actually dehydrate you. If you don’t like plain water, put lemon juice in it.
Thirdly, you need to look at your task list and ask yourself a question: “If I’m not doing this task for the next week or two, what impact is going to have on my business?”
Be really honest with your answer. because most of the tasks on your list probably don’t have more than a 5% impact on your business. So, why are you doing it?
Do you want to keep yourself busy because apparently, that means that you are doing a good job? It is not true.
If you want to start prioritizing your energy, you’d rather do 2 or 3 important tasks that move the needle than 10 just to keep busy and pretend you are doing a good job because that is also a coping mechanism.
We need to start to look at the reasons WHY we work.
The Addiction to Work
Work as a coping mechanism is a form of addiction. I believe most of us have a form of addiction.
This can come from the way we grew up. As children, we often have to feel validated, and this desire for validation turns into a certain coping mechanism.
As a child, I didn’t have fulfillment and the way I could find it was by overworking and always being the best at work. Because of that, later in my life, I died of cardiac arrest from working so much.
When we get validation out of work, we get validation but not the one we need. Because the only validation we need is our own. And if we don’t validate ourselves, we will never get to a point of self-compassion, where we are going to listen to ourselves and not work if we don’t feel good.
Of course, there are other addictions out there, like sugar, alcohol, and social media. But at their core, they are all coping mechanisms, ways to deal with our underlying emotional needs.
Tracking your tasks
If you want to start prioritizing your energy, be more efficient, and work less time, a great exercise to start with is to track yourself.
You can use Toggl to track your time: what tasks you are working on, how long they take, how long you procrastinate, and on which tasks you procrastinate.
Once you track yourself for at least 3 weeks, you will see which of the tasks had an impact, which ones you can delete and let be, and you can detect patterns. Maybe you realize “On that day I felt like this, and I did this task”.
For instance, every time I do things on my website is because I had to do a very overwhelming task that I want to avoid, and instead I work on my website. And I realized that when I started tracking myself.
Do Not Listen to Anyone but Yourself
If I could give one piece of advice to my younger self that I learned over the years while understanding the importance of prioritizing my energy, it would be “Do not listen to anyone around you who is trying to give you an opinion or advice about your life if they have nothing to do with your life or if they are not wearing your shoes” – meaning anyone.
Most people’s opinions are a projection of their fears and limitations. So all you can do is say thank you, put it in a box, and send it back.
My favorite quote is “Other people’s limits are not your limitations”.
There are so many people with good intentions but they don’t realize the impact they have on what they do, what they say, and what they mean.
We have to think about the impact we have and not only about our intentions.
I hope this article helped you to understand the power of prioritizing your energy, and how this can help you to reach your optimal potential.
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