Why You Should Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
Table of Contents
🎯 Summary #
As a human being, managing our energy is more important because this is a limited resources.
We may wrongly think that increasing working hours can do more. However, longer working hours leads more unfocus time and brings negative effect to your work.
Surprisingly, having a monthly plan is better then a detailed daily plan. The later one demotivated people because we face inevitable distractions daily.
💡 Thoughts #
- Stay focus on work by taking regular breaks. (e.g Pomodoro Technique)
- In the article, top 10% productive employees work 52-mins work and take 17-mins break.
- Regularly schedule some time for work individually without distraction.
⭐️ Highlights #
A workplace study found an average working professional experiences 87 interruptions per day, making it difficult to remain productive and focused for a full day.
Surprisingly, the top 10 percent of employees with the highest productivity didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else – often they didn’t even work eight-hour days. Instead, the key to their productivity was that for every 52 minutes of focused work, they took a 17-minute break.
“At any given point, I should have deep work scheduled for roughly the next month. Once on the calendar, I protect this time like I would a doctor’s appointment or important meeting,”
While the researchers assumed that the well-structured daily plans would be most effective when it came to the execution of tasks, they were wrong: the detailed daily plans demotivated students. Harford argues that inevitable distractions often render the daily to-do list ineffective, while leaving room for improvisation in such a list can reap the best results.