Manage your energy like a systems engineer
“How do you manage to do it all?” is a question that I get asked a lot. An attempt to introduce a new analogy to explain my thinking about energy management.
I tend to have many different things going on in my life. As long as I can remember, I always enjoyed juggling with different balls — metaphorically speaking, because I never really learned how to juggle 😉
The first time I became conscious of this was in my last year of high school. Next to school, I was teaching tennis lessons, while tutoring a bunch of younger students, leading the students’ association, and getting my driver's license. That’s when people started to comment on it.
“How do you manage to do all these activities at the same time?”
“Where do you get the energy from to do it all?”
A relatively high level of activity has been my default state for such a long time, that I don’t often reflect on these questions. When I am able to engage in many diverse activities, my brain simply feels at ease. I feel inspired and happy. It feels natural to me, that’s why it can be hard to explain.
Time management is certainly an important factor, but I always had a feeling that there needs to be more to it. What follows is a — maybe premature — attempt to explain my thinking and (rather subconscious) approach to energy management because I really wish I had a more sophisticated answer to the questions above than “good time management” 💡 let’s give it a go…
Energy management analogies
Most of us are familiar with some well-known energy management analogies like “recharging your batteries” or “fill up your own cup first”. These all make perfect sense if we think of our body as a simple system: once we are out of energy, recharge or fill back up with sleep, food, rest, a spa day, vacation, or whatever else we need.
The problem with these types of abstractions is that they are missing one important point: our body is highly reactive to our environment. That’s why I want to share with you here a different analogy that helped me to understand how I am working on maintaining my energy level. It has surprisingly little to do with recharging batteries.
The bathtub analogy
Have you ever heard of the bathtub analogy? The bathtub analogy has been used extensively to illustrate stock and flow relationships. It’s an analogy that is commonly used in economics to explain how banks or markets work, and also for the net-zero approach for greenhouse gases.
It’s a great analogy to think of different inputs and outputs to a system and originally comes from the field of system dynamics. To use this analogy for the context of energy flows in our lives, we will have to extend it a little bit.
Think of a bathtub that is filled with warm and steaming water. And now imagine yourself inside that bathtub️. We’ve added a new element to the system: your body — a system inside a system.
Your body has a number of important inputs that will determine your energy level— food, sleep, and so on. This part of the system is already well understood. The focus of the “body in the bathtub” analogy is on the interactions of the body and the water in the bathtub.
Reduce the energy expense
Let’s have a closer look at the surrounding system: the bathtub. Imagine the bathtub marks the boundaries of your life. The water inside the bathtub is an abstraction of the environment your body lives in with all its characteristics. If your environment is in a good state, the bathtub is full, the water is warm and you can move around in your life effortlessly.
In this state, doing any activity or task does not require a lot of energy from your body. You are floating in the water, you feel light. This is a state where all the requirements in your environment are met to have the least energy expense during any activity. On top of that, if you make sure that your body also has enough energy, you can be extremely productive and get stuff done — without draining yourself.
And this is the key: people that seem to be doing more than others don’t necessarily have more energy or time available. They have simply figured out a way to optimize their environment so it does not require them as much energy or time to get things done.
If the bathtub is in a less favorable state, either the water is cold or there is no water at all, every movement will feel heavy and cost you a lot of energy — even simple tasks. In this state of your environment, it doesn’t really matter how often you fill up your own cup or recharge your batteries, you will come back to an environment that will be draining you out quickly.
Optimize your environment
Managing energy is not just about allowing yourself to recharge your batteries — which is of course also important — but also about optimizing your environment so that most activities feel light and don’t require a lot of energy in the first place. But how do you do that?
If you think of your life, you can certainly identify activities and people that will provide you with energy. And I am sure you can also think of activities and people that mostly take energy from you. The art of staying buoyant is to have a continuous stream of positive, warm energy coming to your environment, and to reduce the number of holes from which energy and warmth are being sucked out of it.
Even if you don’t have any activities or people in your life that cost a lot of energy (lucky you) you will have to work on maintaining the state of your environment constantly, for example, to keep the water warm.
This understanding of how energy flows, being able to recognize activities and then intentionally strengthen intake and reduce outtake — that’s what I believe is my “secret” to managing energy effectively. And it’s really not rocket science.
Energy in — Energy out
Intake and outtake can be very personal and subjective to your own experience, personality, skills, and talents. For some people speaking in front of a crowd would be a massive outtake of energy. I have realized for myself that over time this has actually become a big intake, therefore I am now seeking opportunities for public speaking more often. By practicing public speaking, I transformed this particular activity from an energy outtake to an intake.
Another thing that helps me maintain my energy at a high level is getting help or support, or simply outsourcing tasks that are draining me if possible. Whether you are getting a dog sitter once a week, hiring someone who cleans your flat, or asking for help from a colleague on a project, get all the support you need to optimize your environment.
A big outtake for me is a lack of clarity of roles and responsibilities in a team. I have noticed over time that this consumes so much of my energy — by overthinking every move and interaction—, that I now always try to seek clarity on roles right away. It’s not just activities that I consider when thinking of optimizing my environment, but also identifying the requirements for an environment in which I can do my best work.
And then there are of course all the internal battles that we are fighting that are draining our energy. Perfectionism, as one example, has been one of the biggest energy consumers in my life. Working on these topics using self-reflection practices, therapy, or any other form of processing, can make a huge difference in your productivity and energy management.
Energy management exercise
A little exercise for you: Make a list of your energy intakes (+) and a list of your energy outtakes (-) in your life. Apply weights to them based on how much energy they take or give — relative to each other. Sum up all the weights.
How can you optimize your life so that the final number increases? Are there any energy outtakes that can be transformed to intakes — e.g. by changing your mindset, learning a new skill, or getting support?
Applying systems thinking to your life
Have you ever experienced the feeling of laying in a bathtub from which the water is being released slowly? Imagine how your body will slowly sink down toward the ground of the bathtub — starting to feel heavier and heavier. Once you reach the ground, you will feel the immense difference between how your limbs felt in the water compared to the heaviness of your body now out of the water.
If I think of my life as a system where both my body and my environment are essential components, I am always trying to aim for a feeling of lightness and effortlessness. That’s the state where I can be the most productive, where I can have an impact, and where I can thrive.
This state is utterly fragile and needs quite some work to be maintained, frequently analyzing data and signals, and making adjustments to intake and outtake whenever needed. And I definitely don’t always get it right — I sometimes overfit or underfit, and at times I end up in an empty bathtub or with a flooded bathroom 🤷♀️ but I always try to learn from it for the future.
Become the most knowledgeable and skilled engineer working on the system called Your Life.
I truly believe that if you want to manage your energy better, if you want to be more productive or impactful, then your main goal should be to become the most knowledgeable and skilled engineer working on that incredible system called Your Life 😉 and yes, that’s a lot of work!
Quit chasing short-term hacks or workarounds for productivity. Take actual time to self-reflect and understand yourself. Put in the work consistently, and I promise you will learn so much along the way. Enjoy! 💪
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Thank you for reading along ❤ I hope you enjoyed this analogy of energy management and that it can help you in optimizing your environment.
I’d love to hear more examples of how to use the “body in the bathtub” analogy for your experiences with managing your energy. Let’s brainstorm together — write me in the comments.
P.S. You can learn more about systems thinking in this fantastic book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-systems
