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Managing Energy Instead of Time
While we all understand the fact that time is a finite resource while Energy is not, we as a population is obsessed with management and use of time to its fullest at the expense of depletion of our energy.
With rising demand at work, we make the sacrifice of adding long working hours and taking less time to re-energize, at the expense of our health and social interactions, which leads to the high risk of physical and emotional energy depletion every day that leaves us with less energy to deal with the mounting workloads.
With more employees, especially the members of the top management falling victim to a lack of energy, early life burnouts, and related health complications, more organizations are experimenting with the ways to invest more on the people instead of trying to get more out of them.
The Energy project, a consultation company which researches into the energy and performance of employees at organizations found that over 74% of 150,000 people they interviewed, were suffering from a chronic energy deficit, which leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of distraction, high turnover rates and soaring medical costs among employees.
They also found that helping employees manage their daily habits to reenergize at intermittent periods can lead to striking results within an organization structure including increased efficiency and performance.
With its results proven, ‘Energy Management’ is the new black at many organization structures, which encourages their employees to recognize energy-depleting behaviors to change them for better. Recognizing personal energy as a more important factor than time in increasing the productivity of an organization, has bought many big and small changes to the working and individual behaviors at these organizations.
Better management of personal energy by coming to terms with the ultradian rhythm cycle of humans that assures us a maximum effectiveness within a time period of 90 to 120 minutes is helping many burn outs at work develop a power ritual to re-energize throughout the day.
By making small adjustments to their lifestyle like exercising, taking meals and snacks at regular intervals and developing a consistent sleeping pattern have helped many senior executives in global organizations like Ernest and Young and Sony Ericsson, Paris who took the Energy Audit by Energy Project, to re-energize at given periods of time to maintain a sustainable performance level throughout the working hours of the day.
Other than developing good lifestyle practices, these participants also learned to shed some of the negative practices at work and at home, which has been greatly reducing their efficiency and energy. Learning to identify and address bad habits at work like giving into digital interruptions, which reduces efficiency at work too helped them in better management of personal energy and concentration at work.
Not only did these behavior changes helped them maintain high energy levels within the working hours, these participants also had time to engage more actively and positively with their family members and friends after returning home from work in the evening.
What can be the simple yet highly effective secret behind managing physical and emotional energy at an individual level?
Energy comes in different forms in a human, the body, emotions, mind, and spirit and can be expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals and behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled.
By encouraging the employees to adopt simple practices like taking a simple break and having a snack when you are tired and practicing relaxation methods like deep breathing to beat out the stress and scheduling them into their daily cycle of work using the same project management platform used in an organization, similar to OPPTIMO can infuse energy boosting behavior within the ranks and files of an organization.