Managing Time is a Waste of Energy... Focus on Energy.

Thomas P Seager, PhD
2 min readApr 27, 2018
Productivity = (time) * (energy)

By now, anyone with even a passing interest in self-help and productivity advice has heard the old adages about how time is the most precious of all of our resources, and the one thing that we can’t get more of. Superblogger Nicolas Cole writes that time is our most valuable resource, but Charlie Gilkey tells us that “time management, as a concept, is bankrupt”.

In fact, each one of us has all the time in the world.

No more. No less.

Thinking about time as your “most precious” and “finite” resource is a scarcity mindset trap. What Nicolas and others overlook is that productivity requires more than time. It also requires your energy.

We’ve all had the experience of having spare time, but no energy. Although we say we really want to hop on the treadmill or go for a run, if we haven’t got the energy, we’ll stay on the couch.

To really improve your productivity, you have to watch your energy more carefully than your time.

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