What is energy?

Energy can be thought of as a resource needed for constant physical or mental activities. Like many other resources, energy is finite, meaning that it will deplete throughout your day.

Keep yourself nourished

At all times, you need to keep yourself fed because food is a direct source of energy. In most work places, we are given an hour for lunch to unwind and nourish our bodies.

But when times are hectic and deadlines are crucial, have you ever felt a sense of guilt when it’s time for lunch? Sometimes you just choose to skip it and dedicate that time to completing your work. The truth is that, in the long run, this type of behavior is not sustainable. You will eventually become tired and frustrated, and eventually lose the will to work.

So make sure you make the best of your break time. Eat, socialize and take your mind off work.

Get enough sleep

While sleeping is the most common way to recharge, some of us neglect it in order to get more done in a day. Sleep plays an important role by allowing your body to go into downtime while it repairs itself. Depriving yourself from quality sleep not only affects your energy but also your health. People with insufficient sleep are at a higher risk for high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes. Also, not getting enough quality sleep also leads to a decrease in attention span and an increase in risk of accidents and injuries.

That being said, too much sleep is also a bad thing. The side-effects are similar to the deprivation of sleep. When you wake up after having a good number of hours of sleep, try to get yourself up slowly and not fall into the trap of napping. Follow a fixed sleeping schedule and stick to it. Doing so will cement your biological clock making you feel sleepy just before your sleep time and getting up naturally after hours of rest.

Master your mood

We’ve all been there. Getting stuck in a traffic jam, having a minor disagreement with a loved one, or even just getting up on the wrong side of the bed. All of these happening before work even begins. Not the best way to start the day, but one that is fairly common time to time. While events and people can bring us down, the final decider of your mood is still your own self.

It’s convenient to get swept up by everything and getting down with all that has happened. You need to be self-aware that you can indeed control how your outlook is, even if it’s for a span of time. When you’re all bummed out, the likelihood of you wanting to do anything has severely plummeted. This kind of negative behavior affects your energy as dealing with these emotions will slowly sap it all away and nothing will get done.

We’ve all been there. Getting stuck in a traffic jam, having a minor disagreement with a loved one, or even just getting up on the wrong side of the bed.

What you can do is to always keep in mind that you are the master of your own emotions; your mood. This isn’t as simple as it sounds as each of us have our own thresholds for dealing with stress. Try to think positively and keep solving problems in your mind. Eventually, the tension from all those problems will feel insignificant and you can easily brush it aside.

Quality over quantity

It’s not all just about the amount of time we work though, as quality matters just as much. What it means is that our effectiveness matters even more, and is largely influenced by our energy levels. We need to create opportunities to create more energy throughout the day.

Instead of stacking more things to do in the free-ish slots in your day, it is better to use that time to accomplish what we’ve gone through so far; staying nourished, getting enough sleep and mastering your mood. Always remember that your energy is finite, and that you can only accomplish so many things in a day.

Always remember that your energy is finite, and that you can only accomplish so many things in a day.

Prioritize the tasks that are important, that are time-sensitive, that are creating a bottleneck for others. When you have done so, stack the less important items at the end of every day, spread out during the week. By doing so allows us to focus on quality productivity instead of burning more hours trying to complete everything.

The remote side of things

If you’re a reader of our blog (thanks!), then you probably know that the team at Stampede work from various locations around Malaysia and the rest of the world. The act of managing your energy when you don’t have a physical office can be tricky. ‘Our offices’ are always at our fingertips and this means that we can move in and out of work fairly quickly.

While having flexible hours is a great, it also means drawing the line between work and personal time can be a challenge. Sometimes we get called in out of our usual work hours to get certain tasks completed due to time-sensitivity and urgency.

Thankfully this doesn’t happen very often, and the times it does is when there is a major issue, like a website going down. If we worked in a physical office, we’d have to ask one of our developers to drive into the office and problem solve the issue there and then.

We hope this article sheds some light on why you should focus on managing your energy instead of just solely managing your time. If you have something to share with us, or just want to say hi, drop us a comment down below and we’ll be glad to respond.

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Managing your time right?

So much work, so little time. Within a day we have twenty-four hours to work with and we’re pretty much occupied two-thirds of it

What is Time Management?

Time management is what I am referring to and it is the process of applying methods to consciously control the duration spent doing specific tasks all within a set time boundary. Its goal is to efficiently use the limited hours we have in a day for accomplishing tasks in projects.

Why should I manage my time?

The following are some reasons why time management is more important than you think. It can also be applied to routines that are out of the workplace too.

Time is limited — So much work, so little time. Within a day we have twenty-four hours to work with and we’re pretty much occupied two-thirds of it. By managing it, you can accomplish relevant tasks on the dot and have enough time to go for that yoga class of yours.

Accomplish more with less effort — When you know what to do from the get-go, you can efficiently complete your tasks quickly and with less effort. The reasoning behind this is because the minutes you allocated to complete the task has been set and you’re not going to be redundant by doing non-related tasks. When you’re in ‘the zone’, you can efficiently get your job done without getting distracted.

Become a better decision maker — Because time management requires yourself to analyze and decide how you’re going to plan your tasks throughout the day, you realize that you’ll become better and more confident at deciding how much time you’ll need to complete certain tasks.

Free time is not optional — As much as you’d like to complete your work as soon as possible, some tasks are just way to big to finish up within a day. Pulling consistent long hours on it can make you lose confidence and make your goal seem further away. This is why you need to pace yourself by creating pockets of free time throughout your day. You’ll be able to give yourself that much needed breather to refresh yourself before you go on to completing that daunting task.

Develop self-discipline —  Time management requires the creation of a schedule and sticking to it. To be able to follow a schedule requires discipline and determination. It’s very easy to bail on something but harder to keep to it.

How do I manage my time?

You may be asking yourself on what you need to do exactly. Here are some suggestions that you can follow to keep your time managed.

Prioritize your tasks for the day — Before your day begins, list down all your tasks both important and less critical. Highlight the important tasks and move those items above the list. Focus on the tasks that need to be completed for that day while pushing the less important items for the next day. If you complete your tasks earlier than expected, feel free to work on one of the smaller tasks from the following day.

Assign weights to the tasks — Now with the list prepared, we can now move on to assigning weights to the tasks. By weights I mean the amount of time you think you’ll need to complete specific tasks. Make sure the time allocated is reasonable and realistic while giving yourself some minor buffers for short breathers.

Allocate time for R&R — Burnout is something that is very common in the workplace. Proper recreational time is important to prevent it from happening. Within your day, set certain pockets of time that you can use to recharge yourself. Having a proper lunch without any work distractions can help you maintain your confidence to plow through the rest of the day.

Create a schedule — By now you have your list with the assigned weights to create your schedule. Having a schedule creates a sort of pseudo end goal that we can look forward by the end of the day. Equip yourself with a small planner or notebook to draw a simple schedule that you can refer to throughout the day. For the slightly more techie readers, Google Keep is a great mobile app for creating tasks which you can tick off when you’ve done and completed it.

Stick to it — It goes without saying, if you’ve already come this far in preparing your scheduled routine you need to inject some (maybe a lot of) self-discipline in making sure you can accomplish it. In a way keeping to your schedule is also a task but one that is the predecessor in helping you complete the others efficiently.

Freedom of time

Ultimately, your time is governed by your own actions and decisions. Whatever you decide to do with it just make sure you’re doing it with wholeheartedness and with few regrets. While you can probably reference this guide as a way to maximize your productivity, make sure you spend some time doing the things you love.

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