How to find out where your energy actually goes

A five-minute practice for working out what depletes you, what restores you, and whether the two are anywhere near even.

Most of us could not tell you where our energy went last week.

We know it went. We know Thursday was harder than it should have been, and that by Friday the ordinary things felt heavier than they were. What we cannot say is which parts of the week did that, and which parts, if any, put something back.

That is not carelessness. Nobody ever asks you to look. You are asked about output, deadlines and results, all the time. Nobody asks what it cost to produce them.

This is a way of finding out. It takes about five minutes and you only need something to write on.

One. What depletes you

Picture a typical week. Not a bad one, and not an unusually good one. An ordinary week.

What consistently leaves you with less than you had? Be specific. Certain meetings rather than meetings. Certain people rather than people. The scroll before bed. Eating standing up. The drive home after a particular kind of day.

Write them down. Naming them is most of the work, because a great deal of depletion happens below the level anyone is paying attention to.

Two. What restores you

Now the other column. What genuinely fills you back up?

The honest ones, not the ones that should. A walk. A real meal, eaten slowly. Ten minutes with the door shut. A conversation with someone who does not need anything from you.

People often find this column harder to write, and that on its own is information. If you can name eleven things that deplete you and three that restore you, you have learned something before you have done any of it.

Three. Look at the shape

Put the two side by side and look at the week as a whole.

Are they roughly even? Or is one column doing considerably more work than the other, day after day?

There is no wrong answer here and nothing to feel bad about. Plenty of people have been running at a deficit for so long that it has stopped registering as anything other than normal. That is the thing worth seeing, and seeing it is the entire point of the exercise.

Four. Put something back, on purpose

Not a life overhaul. One thing, placed deliberately.

Either before something depleting you know is coming, so you meet it with a little more in reserve. Or straight after one that caught you off guard, so you recover rather than carry it forward into the rest of the day.

That is the whole practice. A resilient life is not one without depletion. It is one where the restoring is built into the rhythm, on purpose.

What usually happens

Two things, in my experience of taking my clients through this.

The first is that the depleting column is rarely what anyone expected. Most people arrive assuming it will be work. It is usually something smaller and more repetitive: a particular recurring meeting, the twenty minutes after the school run, the fact that lunch away from your desk, or lunch at all, has not happened in a year.

The second is that the restoring column is full of things people already know about and have quietly stopped doing. Almost nobody discovers something new here. They rediscover something they used to do and cannot say when it stopped.

Doing it again

This works as a one-off and it is better as something you return to.

Seasons change what is in each column. So does a new role, a small child, an ill parent, a winter. Running it again in three months is not repetition, it is a different week being looked at honestly.

And once you know your own two columns, you can do a shortened version in your head on any ordinary day. What has taken more than it gave today, and what would put something back before tomorrow. That takes about thirty seconds and it is where the real work happens.

Nothing you write down has to be shown to anyone.