You manage your time best by managing your energy

Or: An excellent addition to your engineering library on time management

I have just finished reading a book called The Cognitive Athlete by Clint Rahe.
The book focuses on methods used in the military, professional sports, and other high-performance fields, and then explains how you can apply them to efforts that are cognitive in nature.
I am not going to review the whole book, but I am going to share with you the basic thrust and something I noticed that is ideal for global engineers.

The basic thrust.
We should not think about time management to maximise our performance as professionals. Instead, we should better understand how our energy levels work so that we can work on the right things at the best time.
This could mean working out when you are most able to think clearly and take on the most challenging of tasks – and then scheduling that time to be free of meetings so you can focus on the hard stuff.
It could also mean finding the time when you are least capable, and then allocating that time to reply to routine emails.
By aligning your periods of maximum energy with the more challenging tasks, you become much more productive.
Further, you should also find ways to automate or routinise as many tasks as you can so that you have energy reserves left over for the tasks that truly need your cognitive capabilities. This includes things like checklists for checking drawings, a standard procedure for approving purchases, and a uniform way for reporting faults in maintenance.
In addition, if you are going to have a period of high demand, then you need to have a period to ramp up prior and then a period of recovery and reflection afterward. What was interesting about this aspect was that these periods could be throughout a day, a week, a month or a quarter. There was no consideration of periods that go for longer. Meaning, if your job is pushing you to 100% until the end of the year, when you can rest, then you are not operating at 100% energy levels – and you are likely far from working optimally.
This is a very rough summary, and if you want to know more about how to maximise your cognitive ability so that you can perform at a higher level, then get yourself a copy.

Why this is important for the global engineer.
As a global engineer, you need to be able to shift to new contexts and still perform well. The perspective of The Cognitive Athlete allows you to understand the nature of cognitive energy expenditure that is required in any new role you find yourself in.
This could be a result of national practice, company practice, or the nature of the specific challenge.
I now know times when I need this more:

• I have worked in countries where the norm is 5.5 days a week so I needed to management me energy differently from other places.
• Some roles were continuous in their nature – always solving problems as they presented – so I had to plan my energy usage on a daily and weekly basis to ensure I would not burn out.
• Other roles had definite busy periods and periods of different task types – I would therefore need to plan for periods to note lessons learned (so I would recall them for the same time next year) and use a short break to get myself in the right frame of mind for the next period.
• I have also worked in roles where, due to time-zone differences, I needed to work at times not aligned with my natural rhythms, and I would need to be more mindful of making the most of those periods where my energy aligned with the opportunity to work on more demanding tasks.

As a global engineer – or as any type of professional – you too can find you will need to better align your energy levels with your job. And efforts for better alignment will pay off big time.

My biggest takeaway from the book.
I certainly appreciate the new perspective on managing energy instead of time. But for me, the one thing that really stuck was the notion of taking time to reflect upon performance after a major event. I am going to think now about those kinds of large singular events where it is beneficial to pause afterward to contemplate how well it went and in what ways so I can do even better next time with better long-term preparation.
Think now about those rarer large events where you don’t get to learn from your experience as much as would be ideal. Maybe you too need to pause after those and take some notes for future reference.