Equipping young women professionals with young families to find fulfillment, contentment and joy as mothers and home makers without losing sight of who they are as women.

Volume 10, Issue 42: Managing Your Energy Part II

We are picking off from part I of this series where we introduced the topic of energy management. It would be better for you to start with part I before diving into this one. In this part we are going to talk about my energy rhythms as an example for how to best manage our energy for efficiency and fulfillment.

Related article: Managing Your Energy Part I

I am most productive in the morning. My mental, creative, spiritual and physical energy are at their peak in the morning. Therefore I don't struggle getting a lot done in the early hours of the day. I found that if I left crucial or hard tasks to the later part of the day, they will either not get done or I would struggle to do them - spend a lot more time getting them done than I would if I did them in the morning.

With this information, I try to do less demanding tasks in the afternoon and later in the week. I schedule my weekly team meetings for the tail end of the week to discuss outputs for the week and set priorities for the next week. For meetings I am invited to, I negotiate to have them in the late afternoon so as to not interfere with my most productive time in the morning when I want to focus on getting my most important work done.

I don't prepare dinner in the evenings now like I did when my kids were younger as they and my husband do most of the cooking now. But I remember how hard I found the task if I started late in the evening. I recall it got to a point when I knew that if I didn't start dinner before 7pm, I wasn't going to prepare it. It was just out of the question as my energy levels that late in the evening are dipping so fast it would take so much out of me to get it done.

With the changes in my family dynamics, I only need to cook once a week now, and I make a point to impress my family with what I set before them. I elect to do that on Fridays as it's the day I work half day. Even though I clock off from office work at around 1pm, I still prefer to get all my prep work for the afternoon cooking in the morning before getting started with office work. This is because I am not very energetic in the afternoon to work on a lot of things at a fast pace.

When I fail to do my cooking and baking prep work in the morning, when I get off work in the early afternoon exhausted from trying to cram in as much as possible, I find the cooking and baking tasks so daunting and intimidating. This tells me that my energy management cuts across mental and physical tasks. My energy interpretes mental tasks in the same fashion as physical tasks. I take it that our mental and physical tasks are very closely related.

Funny enough, I also don't do well if I leave simple things as an evening shower and getting ready for bed routines to very late in the evening. Whenever I do, I drag through getting these mundane tasks done. I also don't do grocery shopping at the end of a working day when I am mentally and physically drained. Doing so feels rather weighty and unexciting for such a simple task.

Stay tuned for part III where we will unveil the importance of aligning ourselves to our energy rhythms for optimal performance and fulfillment.

For His Glory,

Lillian Chebosi