The Engineering Leader

Chapter 5. Energy Management

As an IC, you probably focused on (and were good at) managing your time to deliver on your individual commitments. While time management can still be an issue for managers, often the bigger challenge is energy management: managing your energy such that you can be effective in the more difficult parts of your job. We’ll also discuss how to avoid the trap of being useful, how to navigate burnout, and how the Maslach Burnout Inventory can help you identify and address the warning signs of burnout.¹

Time management is an inherently task-based perspective: we look at our calendar (fixed commitments) and figure out how many deliverables (flexible commitments) we can fit in, then order them by priority.²

Energy management is an impact-based perspective: you look at the impact you want to have and what it will take to accomplish it. You distinguish between your ongoing commitments (the things you have to do consistently) and the one-off commitments, and consider how to balance between them on an ongoing basis.

Time management prioritizes (short-term) output and is a subset of a broader category of “productivity advice”—trying to achieve as much as possible day in and day out. Energy management prioritizes long-term effectiveness and impact.

This chapter is not about productivity advice. Productivity advice is often dispensed as a one-size-fits-all, when the reality is that everyone’s productivity system is predicated on how their brain works, and we are all ...