Are you living to work or working to live? Before you continue reading, close your eyes, and think about this question for a minute.
If your life is centered on your work and your career and if your source of satisfaction is the achievements you have in your profession, then you surely are living to work. However, not everyone enjoys this kind of lifestyle.
Most people are still dreaming a life where they can enjoy their interests aside from their occupation. These people want to work to live, not the other way around. They want to find a job that makes them earn money to support themselves and their dependents. They want to make work only as means to an end.
To have their dream life, these people use strategies to be more productive in everything they do. They develop a routine that makes them efficient in coping with the daily challenges life throws at them.
However, as much as these techniques evolved, so did the problems these methods are trying to address. Sadly, one of these once effective but is now outdated methods is….
Time management is a process where you plan how to use your clock in finishing certain tasks. It usually focuses on how much time you use for every task you do. It aims to increase your productivity and efficiency in creating and managing your schedules to reach your goals.
This used to be a very effective technique, but recently it’s been overlapped by a new trendsetter, which is energy management.
Energy management is an evolved variation of time management. In this method, we don’t focus on how much time we spend on every task. We analyze our body clock and look for our most productive hours in a day. Then we use those hours to finish more tasks.
By managing our energy, we can manage our time. Working at your optimum productivity levels can make you finish early and have more time for yourself afterward. This technique will not only save you time but will also maximize your finite mental energy.
We only have 24 hours in a day, which makes a total of 168 hours in a week. If we work full-time, say an average of 40 hours a week, that will leave us with 128 hours left for other things.
In a week, we prepare and eat our food for an average of 21 hours, cleanse ourselves for 7 hours, sleep for around 56-64 hours, and get stuck in traffic for 15 hours. So how much time do we have left?
We only have around 21-29 hours to do other stuff. In this range, we have to get dressed and undressed, which obviously takes longer for women and parents with children, bond with the family, go to places, do grocery shopping, text a friend, catch up with other people, and more.
Even if we lessen our sleep time and work home-based to avoid traffic, we just can’t fit everything we have to do in a week. But if we use energy management to lessen the time we can finish a workload, we might be able to overcome this dilemma.
However, everything will still depend on your preferences. We just want you to consider the idea of adapting to the trend to cope well with the challenges of life.
If you want to learn more about this method, check out Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s book, “The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.” It’s sold in Amazon on paperback, hardcover, and audio CD. For people who are always on the go, it’s also available in Kindle and Audible.
Let’s work to live and enjoy our time with people or things we value the most. Let’s be more efficient, effective, and productive.