June 13, 2023

Today we are going to prioritize. Have you ever wondered what did get finished today, at work? Or went to an activity that you actually did not want to go to? Well after reading this post, you can assign your Energy Budget accordingly.

Energy budget

In the book The life changing magic of not giving a fuck Sarah Knight talks about a f*ck budget. Bare with me on this one… On a f*ck budget you assign a minimum amount of f*cks to give to things. I would call it an Energy Budget because you choose what to assign your energy towards. Now Sarah does a great job explaining that you could turn down professional and personal requests politely. Why assign an energy budget? Because some times you just don’t have the energy for small talk.

4-hour work week

You might have heard this phrase on social media. Timothy Ferris has become very good at managing his Energy Budget. In his book, he proposes that 80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes. Put differently, 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts and time. This was profound to me because that would mean that 20% of my work would lead to 80% of my success.

But the question is which 20% of my time and effort? Timothy has a question for that: “If you become heavily injured and only had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?”. By answering this question we could get the same results in less time!

Communication is key

If we want to get things done in less time, it is crucial to train the people around us to be more efficient.

• One way is by proposing corresponding by email instead of a meeting or a call.
• If you can’t get out of a meeting. Request them to send an email with the purpose of the meeting and possible solutions. This way everybody involved already elaborated on the subject and in their view the best solution.
• It happens that a colleague passes by and asks if you have a minute. If you have a deadline and only have a period of time to spare, define the time beforehand.
• Now if you really don’t have time to talk, put headphones on (if that is permitted).
• Not every email needs to be answered right away. So try to check your email a fixed amount of times during the day. Also, if it’s not urgent, respond really early or after 5 pm. This way the respondent doesn’t respond immediately.

Image: Unsplash, by Gattorete