How many times have you seen or been on a time management course? How many books and podcasts and blogs and social media posts have you seen about time management? I want you to compare that to how many times you've seen courses and support for energy management. So much less. It's so rare to see people discussing energy management compared to how often we see people talking about time management, and it just doesn't make sense because time passes. We can organize our tasks within time, but we can never manage time itself. It's the one commodity we have very little control over. But that's okay. Because actually time management is rarely the issue. Our issues are usually around energy management and focus management, yet there's much less support out there for this. So that's why I'm recording this podcast.
Hello and welcome to episode 26 of season two of the PhD life coach. And today we are talking energy management. Now this is, it's another personal one for me, really. So I, as most of you know, have some sort of, I don't know what, but undiagnosed ADHD type tendencies. I don't struggle too much with energy. I do struggle with being able to direct my energy towards the things that I intend to do. So my amount of energy, I would say, is somewhere between normal and higher than normal. But my, uh, my ability to direct it into the, um, things that I've sort of intended to do, that I've planned to do, I find quite challenging.
I also have a sister that I love very dearly who has had chronic fatigue for 30 years ish, give or take, and it fundamentally affects every aspect of her life. For her, it's much more about the amount of energy she has. Between the two of us, we have learned an awful lot about how to manage your energy. Now you may have other reasons why energy management is so important to you. If you are a parent with young children or you are menopausal, or you are a part-time PhD student who's doing a PhD in your evenings and weekends, or you are an incredibly busy academic with 4,000 things going on and you don't feel like you've got the energy to do any of them, whatever the reason. Maybe you're older, maybe you have other health conditions, maybe you have other disabilities that I haven't mentioned. There's lots of reasons that energy management is important to all of us. And even if you're somebody who considers yourself pretty healthy, able bodied, no particular reason why you might be struggling with your energy, you may still not be able to kind of, control your energy, use it as you want to, direct it in the areas that you want to spend it. And that is what today's session is all about. Thinking about what do we mean by energy, how can we manage our energy, and what things do we have to be careful of in the process.
Now one of the things my sister and I talk about a lot is there's different types of energy, and these aren't like distinctly defined in the scientific literature or whatever, but there's the physical energy that it takes to do physical tasks. There's emotional energy. You know what it's like when you've just got home from a day at work where everybody's been annoying and you haven't been able to say anything about it and you've had to kind of regulate your emotions and not get frustrated with them and deal with this and you come home and you're just exhausted and you haven't got any left so your partner says one thing to you and you just snap at them. We know what it's like. That's emotional energy.
There's cognitive energy. The energy it needs to sit down and read that article or write that report But where our brains are really thinking lots about something that's difficult, and we're having to stay focused and put our attention on it. That's cognitive energy.
There's also social energy. We vary quite a bit in our introversion, extroversion, and whether we get energy or lose energy from being with other people. But our social energy is another area for us just to be aware of when we're planning all of these things.
A big type of energy that I've noticed is kind of creative energy as well. Sometimes we've got the energy to do clearly defined tasks, but we haven't got the energy to come up with ideas and be sort of generative in that sense. I'd love to know, you can let me know on social media or via my website, if you can think of other types of energy that I haven't covered today.
So why is it useful to understand the different types of energy? Well, for me it's because when we say we're tired, that can mean a whole variety of different things. That can be a deficit in all of these forms of energy where we're just knackered, or it could mean we're low in any one or more of these forms of energy. But if we know what type of tired we are, it can help us to plan much more effectively what we actually need to do now. So as an example, often after a day at work, I feel cognitively tired. I sometimes feel socially tired. Whilst I'm a pretty extroverted person and I do get energy from having all of my coaching sessions and training sessions that I run, at the end of the day, when I've had lots of sessions in a day, I can just be very tired, socially speaking, but I'm not physically tired. And sometimes I can be sat on the sofa being like, I'm so tired. And then my husband suggests we go for a walk and I'm like, I can't, I'm too tired.
And then it's like, no, this makes you feel better. And actually when I get out and walk, I'm not physically tired at all. And the walk becomes rejuvenating for me because I wasn't short of physical energy. I had plenty of physical energy. I was just short on cognitive energy and social energy. So a nice quiet walk where I'm just chatting to my husband or if you're really low on social battery, perhaps where you're not chatting at all, can be exactly what you need. So by understanding these different forms of energy, it can really help us to make decisions.
If we understand these different types of energy, what we also need to understand is which tasks use the different energies. So, the example I just gave you there was pretty obvious. Walking takes physical energy. And if you go with somebody else, it maybe uses a little bit of social energy too. But other things, it's not quite so straightforward, depending on how you find that task, it may take more or less of different types of energy.
So as an example, writing, once I get going on writing, I don't find writing particularly cognitively challenging. And so I can usually write even when I'm feeling relatively cognitively tired. Reading, much less so, unless it's just reading for fun, but reading of academic articles and things where I'm really having to kind of dissect what they mean, I need more cognitive energy to be able to stay focused and to direct my focus onto that reading process.
We get to divide the different tasks we have in our lives into different forms of energy. These ones take physical energy. These ones take emotional energy. These ones take cognitive, social, creative. And we can then use this more nuanced understanding to plan in advance. So when we put ourselves in boss mode, if you don't know what I mean by moss mode, make sure you check out my podcast from two weeks ago, where I talk about boss mode, how we can use our kind of higher brain to plan and strategize and make decisions so that then student us, worker us, can just implement on that.
We can use this knowledge when we're planning to make sure that we plan a nice mixture of different types of tasks, that we're not expecting our brains to do lots and lots and lots of different cognitive things in a row, for example. But we can also use it when we're making more spontaneous decisions.
When we're thinking, I'm too tired to do this, we think, am I too tired to do anything? Or am I too tired to do this specific thing? Is there something different that actually I would feel better if I did as well? So we can kind of use it either in the planning process or in that more spontaneous process.
I use this information to design my day. So I know that tasks that I might struggle to focus on where I need high levels of cognitive energy, I need to do earlier on in the day. I know that I can always plot more social things into the afternoon when I'm typically tired because I have a pretty big social battery and generally get more energy. I'm like a little dynamo. I get more energy from interacting with others. And so for me, I would always try to put coaching, put workshops, put individual meetings into the afternoon because I very rarely run out of social battery in the afternoons.
I then also know- and this can be a strength and a weakness. So keep an eye out for this one in yourself. I also know that my creative energy is often replenished kind of early evening. Early evening when I'm just wrapping up the day, I've been doing lots of things is often when I get a new and exciting idea and get a kind of another burst of energy. Now, if I can direct that appropriately, then that can be amazing because sometimes I can just get a big chunk of something that's creative and important and valuable done in that last hour where actually I haven't got the brain space to do anything that's more organized, for example.
Where I have to be careful, and this is probably the ADHD stuff coming out, is that because I know my creative energy is often boosted at that time of day, I also have to make sure that I don't get caught up in deciding that I definitely have to finish this thing today and therefore end up doing far too much going on into the evening and turning it into some massive project.
So I use my knowledge of the different types of energy that different tasks take and my kind of baseline levels of those different sorts of energy to choose what tasks I do at different times a day. Doesn't always work. As I discussed in last week's podcast, I'm not perfect in any of this, but these are the things that I try to potter through. These are the things that I try to be mindful of when I'm doing my role based time blocking and deciding which chunks of tasks I do at which times of day. I want you to think about how that works for you. What times of day are best for you to be doing your cognitive tasks? What times of day do you need to get physical activity done?
If I've been sitting all day, then I still have physical energy left in the evenings. Other people, regardless of what you've been doing during the day, struggle to summon up physical energy in the evenings and so if you want to get exercise done, you want to have it earlier on in the day. So knowing your own baselines, knowing the types of tasks you need to do and what type of energies you need can really help you plan this stuff out.
Now, as with everything, We're never going to be perfect, and this can be an iterative process. You, if this is the first time you've thought about this like this, just try and watch it over this week. Don't change anything at the moment, but just watch what type of energy different tasks seem to need from you. Watch when you have more energy, when you don't get more energy and kind of just get to know it. Maybe make some notes of the different times of day, the different types of tasks and how you're feeling and just sort of use it as an opportunity to get to know yourself.
Often when we learn something new like this, we start thinking, oh, that's another complication that I don't have time to think about, but actually, we can just do it really gently and really gradually. For people listening, especially if you are an academic or a PhD student who has another job, you might be thinking, well, I don't get to control my energy. I don't get to control what tasks I do at which times of day. I have meetings at all times of day and that's not ideal for me, but it is what I'm given. I have certain hours that I have to work. I have to teach whenever they tell me to teach. I have no control over this. That's fine too, but it's still useful to know because you then get to decide what you put in amongst those things.
So if you know that your schedule, which let's say you don't have control over, has scheduled cognitive tasks in a time where you know that that's not going to be your strength. You can think with what do I need to do with the rest of the day so that I'm as ready and prepared as I could be for that. What do I need to plan in after that? So for example, if you know that you find teaching cognitively and socially tiring, then, what are we going to put in the slot immediately after teaching so that you can replenish as best as possible? We don't have to tell ourselves, I need to be different because this is the timetable they gave me and I've just got to suck it up.
We get to think within the context of the immovable circumstances that I do have, how do I want to manage the rest of my tasks? How do I want to manage how I look after myself? How do I want to manage what I say to myself during all this time? Because even if you can't control it, even if you're like, yeah, but Vik, I'm straight out of my teaching into a quality assurance meeting and there's nothing I can do about it.
Okay. We can at least decide that we're not going to sit in the quality assurance meeting going, I can't believe I can't concentrate. Everybody else can concentrate. I'm so stupid. I can't even do this. We're not going to beat ourselves up about it.
Okay. Yeah. This is probably going to be a bit of a struggle because I'm pretty tired from teaching and I'm tired in the same sort of way that this takes, but I'm going to have a glass of water. I'm going to take my time. I'm going to be kind to myself. I'm going to contribute where I can. And I'm going to accept that this isn't my peak hours to be doing this but I can get it done. Okay.
So regardless, if you have control over it, you can use this information to shape your time. And if you don't, you can use this information to shape how you treat yourself within that predetermined structure.
One theory that I want all of you to be aware of, some of you will be already I know, is called spoon theory. Now this was designed by and for the disabled community and it refers to the notion that energy can be represented by spoons and that we are given a certain number of spoons per day and that number of spoons varies enormously between people and I would argue between different types of energy. How many spoons you have for the different types of energy. And the idea is by conceptualizing it like that, we can make decisions about how we prioritize how we use those spoons.
Now, if you are somebody who has a severely limited number of spoons, then you're a real Olympian in this process. You know exactly how many spoons you have, how many spoons, even minor tasks, like having a shower or getting dressed or those sorts of things, how many spoons they take.
And you are really the masters. I see it with my sister. You are the masters of knowing, if I do this, then I can't do that. If I do that, then I'll need to do this. And really being very sophisticated with your spoon management. It's like, I truly believe if you want to learn to budget, you need to speak to people who don't have much money because people without much money are absolutely skilled as anything at working out exactly what's going where, exactly what sacrifices they need to make on this in order to make that happen and so on.
Don't budget from a rich person. It's easy to budget when you're rich. And similarly, learning to budget energy from people with limited energy can be a really useful tool. So however many spoons you think you have, we can conceptualize it like this and use it to make more intentional decisions about how we spend those spoons. So what can we learn from spoon theory?
Firstly is accepting that everybody has limits on their numbers of spoons. Now, for some of you that will be absolutely obvious based on your health status, your age, all the things I discussed earlier. You might be really, really aware of your limitations. For others, you may never have thought about it like that. If you're generally healthy, got a decent amount of energy, you may never have thought about it like that. And you may still be stuck in the trap that I used to be stuck in of, I should be able to do everything. I did not accept that I had a limited number of spoons. I thought that I should be able to have an active social life and lots of hobbies and lots of family time and lots of work in lots of different directions and do all the extracurricular things I thought I should be able to do at all.
And because I had probably more energy than most people, I didn't like to accept that there was any limit on that. And it was only actually when I accepted that even though my limit is pretty big compared to lots of people, there is a limit. And therefore, even though I've got quite a lot to go around, I still need to decide how I'm going to use it and how I'm going to spend it.
Another lesson from spoon theory is don't judge yourself by your best days. So, sometimes, regardless of your health status, we have a good day, where we get loads more done than we normally do, within whatever context that means for you. And it can be really easy to judge every other day against that standard. That if I could get that much done in that day, imagine what I could do if I did that every day.
And then when we have a normal day where we get a normal amount of stuff done, where we use a normal amount of spoons, it feels somehow inadequate compared to that perfect day, that one day where it all worked. In fact, one of my favorite questions to ask clients who say that they don't feel like they've done enough is what would constitute enough? What is enough hours done in a day? What is enough tasks done in a day? How much work do you have to do to declare it enough? And in most cases, they have never thought about it. They've never considered what would be enough. It's just a vague sense that they would know when it was enough. And the problem is, when we've only got a vague sense of what's enough, we spend most of our time thinking that it wasn't enough.
So remember, best days are exceptions. They are not days against which to judge ourselves.
Another lesson is that you can borrow spoons from the future, but only if you pay them back quickly. So what I mean by that is you can use more spoons in a day than you strictly speaking have. You know, we've all done it where we stay up late finishing something off or going out and having a good time, whatever it is. And then the next day we have to rest much more than we did in order to repay those spoons. And every now and again, for most of us, we can do that. We have to balance up the consequences of doing that. How big a deal is it to have to rest the next day? How easily replenished are your spoons? For some of you, particularly if you have ongoing health issues, we'll find that it's not easy to replenish your spoons. And so borrowing from the future leads to the next day not being worth what you gained by borrowing it, i. e. the amount of rest needed to replenish the spoon, the amount of pain you experienced, whatever it may be, makes it not worth it. But even if you're healthy and you're borrowing from the future, you're overusing your energy, be really mindful of when you are repaying this.
Because sometimes, especially healthy people who don't have issues with their energy levels generally, think they can continue to borrow from the future indefinitely. They can keep pushing themselves. They can keep using more spoons than they actually got, and it will be okay. I'll muddle through. I'm always all right, really. And that's the path to burning out. That's the path to overwork and then actually having physical difficulties that will make it much harder for you to replenish those spoons in the long run.
So, think about the consequences for you as an individual in your particular circumstances from borrowing for the future. And if you think it's worth it, make sure that you are also strategizing as to when and how you're going to be replenishing those spoons before the debt gets too big.
I also want you to remember that even when we do a task, we can choose how many spoons we're giving to it, and which spoons we're giving to it. So, I've talked before about the joy of doing some tasks badly, just because they're not that important. Filling in a form? Don't mess about with the fonts. Just get it filled in. Don't tidy anything up. Right, good enough, happy days, off it goes. You can choose how many spoons you spend on something.
Another example of that, outside of the kind of mindless tasks that don't feel important, is how many spoons you are going to give to the emotional side of it. So sometimes when we're at work whether you're a PhD student or an academic, we can get really caught up in all the stories, right? There's so many stories about, oh, it's not fair because this is happening, and it's not fair because that's happening, and they should be doing this, and they're not doing that. And all of those thoughts take emotional energy. They take from that store of spoons that we have to give things that we care about.
And it's not easy to detach yourself from that because we usually care about the things around us and we care about justice, whether that's on a tiny, small, local level of our department or more widely than that, but you get to choose how many spoons you spend thinking and talking to yourself about this stuff.
It is perfectly acceptable to sit in a committee meeting and go, you know what? I don't have enough emotional spoons for this argument. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and not get involved. You can do that. You can decide that this argument just is not worth the emotional spoons. You can decide that this decision is not worth the amount of cognitive spoons you're giving it. Sometimes we get really caught up on, you know, should the title of my article be this or this? I don't know. How many cognitive spoons are you willing to give it? Not many. It doesn't matter. Just pick one. It's all good. Okay. So if you're finding there are things that are particularly draining any one type of your energy, ask yourself, Not how many spoons does it take? Ask yourself, how many spoons am I willing to give this thing? Because you have more control over that than it might feel sometimes.
Another lesson we can learn is around what we do when we're low on spoons. And I'm going to talk in a second about replenishing spoons because that's super important and I don't want anyone to think that any of this is about sort of driving through and doing more than you're capable of because it's really not.
But when we've got a small number of spoons left, we often think what we need to do is small tasks. And then we end up doing the things that are often much less important. Just clearing these emails here and there, filing that, tidying this up. You know, the busy work that always feels achievable, often doing things for other people, because that feels achievable and it feels important because they're going to thank us for it, and so we think not many spoons left. I'll do the easy things. And that's fine. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
But if you find yourself doing that habitually, and you're always or regularly a bit short of spoons, the problem is that you will never feel you've got enough spoons for the big tasks. Often, especially during term time, when, you know, academics, you're teaching and got student responsibilities as well as all your research work and so on, we feel like we haven't got any spoons at all that we can give to the big tasks, because we need lots of spoons for them. And so we give little bits of spoons to all of the small things.
But what I want to encourage you to think about instead, is if you haven't got many spoons left, how can you take small chunks out of the big tasks, instead of filling yourself up with the small tasks? What do I mean by that? So often our big tasks are writing, designing a presentation, planning our thesis, those sorts of things, you know, big important things that actually our progression of our PhDs dependent on, our getting a secure jobs dependent on, going for promotions dependent on, all these big things that actually really need to happen for our careers and for our contribution to the world are often the ones we don't feel we have enough spoons for.
If we can really break those down into much more manageable chunks than we usually do, then suddenly we're in a position where actually with our few spoons we've got left, we could choose to just chip a little bit away from that paper, instead of using those last spoons to fill in some bit of crappy paper at the universities told you to do.
But this only works if we know what those chunks are, because we know when we're low on spoons, when we're low on energy, the thought of looking at a big task and going, oh, how can I break off a little bit of this that I can do while I'm struggling, It's not going to happen, is it? We're going to struggle with that. It's not going to be good.
So one of the things you can do when you're in boss mode is figure out how to turn the big job that you want to do this week or this month into very tiny things so that it's always clear what the next step is, and you don't have to work out all the tiny things. You just have to work out the next two or three tiny things that need doing. Because then if you have only got a few spoons left, Let's eat something important. Let's eat something that we actually care about. Because it's amazing how, if you chip away at something, how fast progress you can really make.
The final thing is, I want you to think about what replenishes your spoons. And I want you to think about this from two perspectives. One is the, what replenishes your spoons that will feel good and that we therefore want to do more. So for me, walks always replenish my spoons, uh, showers always replenish my spoons, playing with a dog, all those things. I've talked about that in a past episode, before, so figure out for you, what tasks replenish your spoons. They make you feel better and able to do the things that you want to do.
I want you also though, to be careful of false replenishment. So, this may be mainly for the ADHD people out there, but I think some of the rest of you might struggle with it too. I get false replenishment from taking on new tasks. Because I'm a creative person, and I'm somebody who's very enthusiastic, and I have lots of ideas, and there's lots of things that I think should happen in the world, I get a lot of energy from discussing new ideas and agreeing to do new things and starting new stuff.
I get very excited. And that's brilliant. It's good to know. But I have also learned over the last few years to be cautious of trying to get my energy from there, because that's the route to overcommitment. That's the route to overwhelm and that's the route to never feeling like I'm on top of anything at all.
Because if every time I'm low on spoons, I make myself feel better by taking on more things, that's no not astainable strategy. And it's taken me 20 odd years to realize that, but we got there. So, you know, happy days. You can learn it now. Um, But think for you, what are activities that you think replenish you, but that don't?
Another one for me is social media. When I've got no spoons to do anything useful, I'm I often go on social media and feel like I feel, I never feel better for going on social media. I like social media, it has its place, I still want it in my life, but too much time on social media feels like it's replenishing me, feels like it's a break, but actually I end up more drained than I started with.
So think for you, what false replenishments do you have? For some people it's alcohol, for some people it's eating. So think about what things do you tell yourself replenish you but don't actually in reality replenish you and be really cautious of those things.
So I want you to spend some time picking things, picking just one or two activities that do genuinely replenish you. You enjoy them while you're doing them. And you feel rejuvenated after you do them. Be really mindful of what those are and consider even planning them into your day in advance of everything else. One of the principles of role based time blocking is to put your replenishment activities in first. So we don't put meetings in first.
We don't put tasks in first. We put the things that are needed to maintain your spoons, to maintain your energy, to maintain your quality of life frankly. We put those in first. So identify what they are. Make sure you're planning them first. I really hope this has been useful for you. I am very aware that I am using a theory that has been designed by and for people in the disabled community. Often what is designed by those who are most in need can also be used in a kind of universal design way for everybody else. There's an awful lot we can learn from and with people who are struggling with this the most.
With that in mind, just as a little side note at the end. Be really mindful of the spoon levels of the people around you, and the fact that they might have different absolute numbers of spoons, and might be distributed differently amongst the different types of energy.
So one thing my sister and I always have to deal with is that I get more energy from interacting and she uses up energy from interacting. And so we have to balance that between us. Cause I offer is like, Oh, if you need to get that done, we could do it together. It would help. And so she's like, no, that doesn't help. That makes it harder, that uses more energy than if I did it on my own. Whereas for me, the self regulation required to do something on my own is enormously higher than if I was doing it with somebody else. You know, I'm the kid that my mum used to get my friend around to sit on my bed while I tidied my bedroom because then I'd actually do it. Because I have so much less resistance to doing it when somebody else was in the room.
So be mindful of your own spoons. how many you have, what type, and how you spend them, and where you can get more of them, and be mindful of the spoons of the people around you, and how they may well be different to yours.
And with a little bit of consideration to ourselves, and to those that surround us, we can make much more intentional decisions about how we use our energy so that we can live the lives that we want to live. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.