Manage Your Energy Not Your Time

This article is made available to you with compliments of The Energy Project. Further posting, copying, or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org. www.hbrreprints.org M ANAGING Y OURSELF Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy • Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 1 Article Summary 2 Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications 10 Further Reading The science of stamina has advanced to the point where individuals, teams, and whole organizations can, with some straightforward interventions, significantly increase their capacity to get things done. Reprint R0710B This article is made available to you with compliments of The Energy Project. Further posting, copying, or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org. M A N A G I N G Y O U R S E L F Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time page 1 The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice C O P YR IG H T © 2 00 7 H A R V A R D B U SI N E SS S C H O O L P U B LI SH IN G C O R P O R A T IO N . A LL R IG H T S R E SE R V E D . Organizations are demanding ever-higher performance from their workforces. People are trying to comply, but the usual method—putting in longer hours—has backfired. They’re getting exhausted, disen- gaged, and sick. And they’re defecting to healthier job environments. Longer days at the office don’t work because time is a limited resource. But personal energy is renewable, say Schwartz and McCarthy. By fostering deceptively simple rituals that help employees regularly re- plenish their energy, organizations build workers’ physical, emotional, and mental resilience. These rituals include taking brief breaks at specific intervals, express- ing appreciation to others, reducing inter- ruptions, and spending more time on activities people do best and enjoy most. Help your employees systematically rejuve- nate their personal energy, and the benefits go straight to your bottom line. Take Wachovia Bank: Participants in an energy renewal program produced 13 percentage points greater year-over-year in revenues from loans than a control group did. And they exceeded the control group’s gains in revenues from deposits by 20 percentage points. Schwartz and McCarthy recommend these practices for renewing four dimensions of per- sonal energy: PHYSICAL ENERGY • Enhance your sleep by setting an earlier bedtime and reducing alcohol use. • Reduce stress by engaging in cardiovascu- lar activity at least three times a week and strength training at least once. • Eat small meals and light snacks every three hours. • Learn to notice signs of imminent energy flagging, including restlessness, yawning, hunger, and difficulty concentrating. • Take brief but regular breaks, away from your desk, at 90- to 120-minute intervals throughout the day. EMOTIONAL ENERGY • Defuse negative emotions—irritability, impatience, anxiety, insecurity—through deep abdominal breathing. • Fuel positive emotions in yourself and oth- ers by regularly expressing appreciation to others in detailed, specific terms through notes, e-mails, calls, or conversations. • Look at upsetting situations through new lenses. Adopt a “reverse lens” to ask, “What would the other person in this conflict say, and how might he be right?” Use a “long lens” to ask, “How will I likely view this situ- ation in six months?” Employ a “wide lens” to ask, “How can I grow and learn from this situation?” MENTAL ENERGY • Reduce interruptions by performing high- concentration tasks away from phones and e-mail. • Respond to voice mails and e-mails at des- ignated times during the day. • Every night, identify the most important challenge for the next day. Then make it your first priority when you arrive at work in the morning. SPIRITUAL ENERGY • Identify your “sweet spot” activities—those that give you feelings of effectiveness, ef- fortless absorption, and fulfillment. Find ways to do more of these. One executive who hated doing sales reports delegated them to someone who loved that activity. • Allocate time and energy to what you con- sider most important. For example, spend the last 20 minutes of your evening com- mute relaxing, so you can connect with your family once you’re home. • Live your core values. For instance, if con- sideration is important to you but you’re perpetually late for meetings, practice in- tentionally showing up five minutes early for meetings. HOW COMPANIES CAN HELP To support energy renewal rituals in your firm: • Build “renewal rooms” where people can go to relax and refuel. • Subsidize gym memberships. • Encourage managers to gather employees for midday workouts. • Suggest that people stop checking e-mails during meetings. This article is made available to you with compliments of The Energy Project. Further posting, copying, or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org. M ANAGING Y OURSELF Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy harvard business review • october 2007 page 2 C O P YR IG H T © 2 00 7 H A R V A R D B U SI N E SS S C H O O L P U B LI SH IN G C O R P O R A T IO N . A LL R IG H T S R E SE R V E D . The science of stamina has advanced to the point where individuals, teams, and whole organizations can, with some straightforward interventions, significantly increase their capacity to get things done. Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpet- ually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and sel- dom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk. Wanner’s experience is not uncommon. Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which inevitably take a toll on us physically, men- tally, and emotionally. That leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of dis- traction, high turnover rates, and soaring medical costs among employees. We at the Energy Project have worked with thousands of leaders and managers in the course of doing consulting and coaching at large organi- zations during the past five years. With re- markable consistency, these executives tell us they’re pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up and increasingly feel they are at a breaking point. The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals— behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible. To effectively reenergize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated—and able—to bring more of themselves to work every day. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circum- stances they’re facing. This article is made available to you with compliments of The Energy Project. Further posting, copying, or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org. Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time • • • M ANAGING Y OURSELF harvard business review • october 2007 page 3 The rituals and behaviors Wanner estab- lished to better manage his energy trans- formed his life. He set an earlier bedtime and gave up drinking, which had disrupted his sleep. As a consequence, when he woke up he felt more rested and more motivated to exercise, which he now does almost every morning. In less than two months he lost 15 pounds. After working out he now sits down with his family for breakfast. Wanner still puts in long hours on the job, but he renews himself regularly along the way. He leaves his desk for lunch and usually takes a morning and an afternoon walk outside. When he ar- rives at home in the evening, he’s more re- laxed and better able to connect with his wife and children. Establishing simple rituals like these can lead to striking results across organizations. At Wachovia Bank, we took a group of em- ployees through a pilot energy management program and then measured their perfor- mance against that of a control group. The participants outperformed the controls on a series of financial metrics, such as the value of loans they generated. They also reported substantial improvements in their customer relationships, their engagement with work, and their personal satisfaction. In this article, we’ll describe the Wachovia study in a little more detail. Then we’ll explain what execu- tives and managers can do to increase and regularly renew work capacity—the approach used by the Energy Project, which builds on, deepens, and extends several core concepts developed by Tony’s former partner Jim Loehr in his seminal work with athletes. Linking Capacity and Performance at Wachovia Most large organizations invest in developing employees’ skills, knowledge, and compe- tence. Very few help build and sustain their capacity—their energy—which is typically taken for granted. In fact, greater capacity makes it possible to get more done in less time at a higher level of engagement and with more sustainability. Our experience at Wachovia bore this out. In early 2006 we took 106 employees at 12 regional banks in southern New Jersey through a curriculum of four modules, each of which focused on specific strategies for strengthening one of the four main dimen- sions of energy. We delivered it at one-month intervals to groups of approximately 20 to 25, ranging from senior leaders to lower-level managers. We also assigned each attendee a fellow employee as a source of support be- tween sessions. Using Wachovia’s own key performance metrics, we evaluated how the participant group performed compared with a group of employees at similar levels at a nearby set of Wachovia banks who did not go through the training. To create a credible basis for comparison, we looked at year-over- year percentage changes in performance across several metrics. On a measure called the “Big 3”—revenues from three kinds of loans—the participants showed a year-over-year increase that was 13 percentage points greater than the control group’s in the first three months of our study. On revenues from deposits, the participants exceeded the control group’s year-over-year gain by 20 percentage points during that same period. The precise gains varied month by month, but with only a handful of excep- tions, the participants continued to signifi- cantly outperform the control group for a full year after completing the program. Although other variables undoubtedly influenced these outcomes, the participants’ superior perfor- mance was notable in its consistency. (See the exhibit “How Energy Renewal Programs Boosted Productivity at Wachovia.”) We also asked participants how the pro- gram influenced them personally. Sixty-eight percent reported that it had a positive impact on their relationships with clients and cus- tomers. Seventy-one percent said that it had a noticeable or substantial positive impact on their productivity and performance. These findings corroborated a raft of anecdotal evi- dence we’ve gathered about the effectiveness of this approach among leaders at other large companies such as Ernst & Young, Sony, Deutsche Bank, Nokia, ING Direct, Ford, and MasterCard. The Body: Physical Energy Our program begins by focusing on physical energy. It is scarcely news that inadequate nutrition, exercise, sleep, and rest diminish people’s basic energy levels, as well as their ability to manage their emotions and focus their attention. Nonetheless, many executives don’t find ways to practice consistently Tony Schwartz (tony@theenergyproject .com) is the president and founder of the Energy Project in New York City, and a coauthor of The Power of Full En- gagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Per- sonal Renewal (Free Press, 2003). Catherine McCarthy (catherine@ theenergyproject.com) is a senior vice president at the Energy Project. This article is made available to you with compliments of The Energy Project. Further posting, copying, or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org. Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time • • • M ANAGING Y OURSELF harvard business review • october 2007 page 4 healthy behaviors, given all the other demands in their lives. Before participants in our program begin to explore ways to increase their physical energy, they take an energy audit, which includes four questions in each energy dimension— body, emotions, mind, and spirit. (See the ex- hibit “Are You Headed for an Energy Crisis?”) On average, participants get eight to ten of those 16 questions “wrong,” meaning they’re doing things such as skipping breakfast, fail- ing to express appreciation to others, strug- gling to focus on one thing at a time, or spending too little time on activities that give them a sense of purpose. While most partici- pants aren’t surprised to learn these behaviors are counterproductive, having them all listed in one place is often uncomfortable, sobering, and galvanizing. The audit highlights employ- ees’ greatest energy deficits. Participants also fill out charts designed to raise their aware- ness about how their exercise, diet, and sleep practices influence their energy levels. The next step is to identify rituals for build- ing and renewing physical energy. When Gary Faro, a vice president at Wachovia, began the program, he was significantly overweight, ate poorly, lacked a regular exercise routine, worked long hours, and typically slept no more than five or six hours a night. That is not an unusual profile among the leaders and managers we see. Over the course of the pro- gram, Faro began regular cardiovascular and strength training. He started going to bed at a designated time and sleeping longer. He changed his eating habits from two big meals a day (“Where I usually gorged myself,” he says) to smaller meals and light snacks every three hours. The aim was to help him stabi- lize his glucose levels over the course of the day, avoiding peaks and valleys. He lost 50 pounds in the process, and his energy levels soared. “I used to schedule tough projects for the morning, when I knew that I would be more focused,” Faro says. “I don’t have to do that anymore because I find that I’m just as focused now at 5 PM as I am at 8 AM .” Another key ritual Faro adopted was to take brief but regular breaks at specific inter- vals throughout the workday—always leav- ing his desk. The value of such breaks is grounded in our physiology. “Ultradian rhythms” refer to 90- to 120-minute cycles during which our bodies slowly move from a high-energy state into a physiological trough. Toward the end of each cycle, the body begins to crave a period of recovery. The signals in- clude physical restlessness, yawning, hunger, and difficulty concentrating, but many of us ignore them and keep working. The conse- quence is that our energy reservoir—our remaining capacity—burns down as the day wears on. Intermittent breaks for renewal, we have found, result in higher and more sustainable performance. The length of renewal is less im- portant than the quality. It is possible to get a great deal of recovery in a short time—as little as several minutes—if it involves a ritual that allows you to disengage from work and truly change channels. That could range from getting up to talk to a colleague about some- thing other than work, to listening to music on an iPod, to walking up and down stairs in an office building. While breaks are coun- tercultural in most organizations and counter- intuitive for many high achievers, their value is multifaceted. Matthew Lang is a managing director for Sony in South Africa. He adopted some of the same rituals that Faro did, including a How Energy Renewal Programs Boosted Productivity at Wachovia At Wachovia Bank, employees participating in an energy renewal program outper- formed a control group of employees, demonstrating significantly greater improve- ments in year-over-year performance during the first quarter of 2006. 0 10 20 30 40 50 0 10 20 30 40 50 Participants Control group Participants Control group Percentage increase in deposit revenues Percentage increase in loan revenues* *From three critical kinds of loans This article is made available to you with compliments of The Energy Project. Further posting, copying, or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org. Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time • • • M ANAGING Y OURSELF harvard business review • october 2007 page 5 20-minute walk in the afternoons. Lang’s walk not only gives him a mental and emo- tional breather and some exercise but also has become the time when he gets his best cre- ative ideas. That’s because when he walks he is not actively thinking, which allows the dominant left hemisphere of his brain to give way to the right hemisphere with its greater capacity to see the big picture and make imaginative leaps. The Emotions: Quality of Energy When people are able to take more control of their emotions, they can improve the quality of their energy, regardless of the external pres- sures they’re facing. To do this, they first must become more aware of how they feel at various points during the workday and of the impact these emotions have on their effectiveness. Most people realize that they tend to perform best when they’re feeling positive energy. What they find surprising is that they’re not able to perform well or to lead effectively when they’re feeling any other way. Unfortunately, without intermittent recov- ery, we’re not physiologically capable of sus- taining highly positive emotions for long periods. Confronted with relentless demands and unexpected challenges, people tend to slip into negative emotions—the fight-or- flight mode—often multiple times in a day. They become irritable and impatient, or anx- ious and insecure. Such states of mind drain people’s energy and cause friction in their relationships. Fight-or-flight emotions also make it impossible to think clearly, logically, and reflectively. When executives learn to rec- ognize what kinds of events trigger their neg- ative emotions, they gain greater capacity to take control of their reactions. One simple but powerful ritual for defusing negative emotions is what we call “buying time.” Deep abdominal breathing is one way to do that. Exhaling slowly for five or six sec- onds induces relaxation and recovery, and tu