The Friday Thing #705

Whisky last week – or whiskey as I was reminded. I like them both.

The Friday Thing #705 may be a bit shorter than usual this week – because I’m feeling slightly depleted – energy wise.

 At the beginning of my career, I was fascinated by time management techniques and devoured books and tips on the topic. I also read stuff about managing your inbox and dabbled with some of those techniques. Yet, over the last few years, I’ve realized that what’s more important than time management is energy management. This likely falls into the category of “duh, obvious” for some of you and if that’s the case, feel free to stop here and use your energy for something else. If not, read on.

Energy management became more obvious to me when I began to lead bigger teams and when the demands on my time spanned multiple, simultaneous projects across time zones. I remember when I was first offered the support of an assistant to help manage my schedule and shuddered that the thought of turning that over to someone – both because I liked managing it myself – but more so because I was worried what they would think about my lack of management of said schedule. That same schedule is now how I think about and manage my energy at work with the help of an amazing assistant. 

A few weeks ago, I took the somewhat risky move of sharing my schedule with my entire team – literally showing them a live screenshare of my schedule for the week. It looked similar to what you see below.

I’ve removed the meeting details for anonymity but also because they’re not the important part I am trying to convey here. The colours are the key.

Using the Conditional Formatting feature in Outlook, my calendar visually conveys to me how my day – or in this case work week – looks. Red indicates 1:1 meetings, yellow is travel (much less at the moment), light blue are meetings with more than one person, green are times I am holding for incoming meetings. Perhaps most important is purple which are times I block out to get work done – typically catching up on emails, reading, approving documents/budgets, writing etc. There are also some OOF (out of office) times in a few spots as well as some meetings that I have tentatively accepted in light blue. Feel free to judge if I am using my time well or not ??

What this colour coding does is give me an “at a glance’ view of where I will need to give energy (for example in 1:1’s) and where I am likely to receive energy through learning from others in a meeting or forum. For example, on Tuesday you see a 3-hour block of blue – this was a full on receive energy meeting where I learned a ton about our technical roadmap for the next few years. I intentionally booked some time out that afternoon for personal commitments, but also to digest all of that information vs. have it drain away through cognitive overload from more meetings later in the day. I’ve also learned that having 1:1’s close to each other (sometimes back-to-back) is useful for me as when I am in that zone, it’s good to keep my giving energy consistent.

There’s no real science to this and I continue to tweak and improve things. During the week I will have a 1:1 (one of those red blocks) with my assistant and we’ll look at the next few weeks of my schedule. We look to move things around where there are conflicting priorities and try to protect the work blocks as best as we can – though they often get nibbled away at as “free time”. What I also do during these sessions though is very intentionally move things around with a view to energy balancing. That’s the real key for me – finding the balance throughout the week where I can give energy and where I will receive energy. It’s been a real breakthrough in how I work over the last few years, and I share in the hope it may help you.

In a future post, I can share more on related tactics if there is interest – things like using the features it Outlook and more recently Microsoft Viva. The Insights capabilities in Viva are very cool – helping me understand how I am using my time, who I am collaborating most with (and losing contact with), how my focus time is over the month, whether I am multitasking in meetings, how consistently I am having 1:1’s with my team….and tons more.

Okay…time to log off and stop looking at my schedule. The sun is shining outside, and I have energy to pour a glass of wine.

Happy Friday…have a great weekend.

-Steve