Energy Management vs. Time Management

Several months ago, I began my day with a pastoral care appointment. I knew what the appointment was about and I expected it to be a brief, 20 minute conversation and prayer before going about my day. (I’m fabricating a few details to make my point without breaching confidentiality.)

However, many different things came up during the appointment and I ended up spending about 2 hours with the person, talking with them about lifelong struggles and praying with them for the myriad of situations affecting them.

One thing I’ve learned about pastoral ministry is that you have to build time in between appointments because you never know when one appointment is going to take longer than expected. I had built in plenty of time before my next morning appointment, so this was a “no harm, no foul” situation.

I went about my day as planned. Or so I thought.

Later that afternoon, I sat down for 90 minutes I had set aside to prep for my upcoming sermon. I opened my Bible, pulled a commentary from my shelf, opened my laptop and… nothing.

I couldn’t bring myself to prep my sermon. I wanted to prep my sermon. I had made time to prep my sermon. But nothing was happening. It was if my brain had completely shut down.

Have you ever been in a situation like this? Maybe not a situation that involved pastor-specific tasks like pastoral care and sermon prep. But a similar situation where you wanted to do something but couldn’t?

Maybe you spent all day caring for your kids and getting them where they needed to be. Once all your little ones are finally tucked in their bed, you open up your laptop and a textbook, planning to work on your night classes, but your brain fell asleep when your kids did.

Or maybe you spent all day in your garden, plucking weeds and pulling vegetables. You clean yourself up before sitting down to do your daily Bible reading and the next thing you know, you’re waking up from a nap just in time to start cooking dinner.

Or maybe you wake up at the crack of dawn, get the kids up and out the door, grab your lunch and your briefcase, sit down at your desk with a warm cup of coffee to work on your project due by week’s end and… nothing.

Why—even when we’ve set aside the time—can we not be present to the things we want to do when we want to do them?

Because it’s not enough to make time for those tasks. We also need to have the energy for the tasks.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about time management. Time management is a skill I sorely lack and, given the life I want to live, a skill I need. But even as I’ve gotten better at time management, time management hasn’t solved all of my problems. There are times when I’ve set aside the time to complete a task but still can’t seem to get the task done. Why is that?

It’s because I don’t have the energy to complete the task.

Let’s go back to that day I began this blog post with. When I planned out my day, I had planned for a 20 minute pastoral care visit, not a 2 hour pastoral care visit. And even though my day had the time for a 2 hour pastoral care visit, I hadn’t planned to spend the energy on a 2 hour pastoral care visit.

Pastoral care visits, for me, are meaningful and worthwhile. But they take a lot of energy from me. Listening and praying and thinking and caring are all things I enjoy doing, but they draw deeply from my energy reserves.

So does sermon prep. Preparing a sermon involves a lot of thinking and praying and reading and studying, things that also take lots of energy.

So having a 20 minute pastoral care visit turn into a 2 hour visit meant that I used significantly more energy than I expected to. Even though I didn’t need to rearrange my schedule because of the time the visit took, I should have rearranged my schedule from the energy that visit took.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is this: if you have some tasks in your day that require more energy than other tasks—sermon prep, school work, counseling appointments, client meetings, project management, Bible study, financial planning, etc.—you don’t just need to be thinking about time management. You need to be thinking about energy management.

When I floated this idea in my weekly preaching tip to the preachers at Preacher’s Block, I got lots of curiosity and questions like, “How do you manage your energy?”

I’ve come up with a list of 10 ways you can manage your energy so that you can get your energy-required tasks done when you need to get them done:

1. Sleep, eat, exercise

First, start with the basics. If you’re not sleeping enough (between 7 and 9 hours a night), it makes energy management nearly impossible because, well… you don’t have energy to manage. And I know what you’re thinking: I’m not the average person… I don’t need 7-9 hours of sleep a night. It’s highly unlikely that you’re an exception to that rule, so stop telling yourself that.

If you’re not eating well or exercising either, see above. It’s hard to manage energy when you don’t have energy. So start with these three.

2. Identify what tasks require and don’t require energy

Some things you do in the day require a lot of energy—things like homeschooling your children, balancing a budget, or working on a Bible study, perhaps.

Other things don’t require a lot of energy—things like laundry, emails, and writing thank you notes, perhaps.

Identify which tasks require energy and which don’t so that you know how to budget your energy accordingly. More on that in a moment.

3. Utilize your high-energy times

Over the next week, become aware of when in your day you have the most energy. For me, I have high energy in the morning and low energy in the afternoon. Because of this, it’s more profitable for me to schedule the tasks and appointments that require me to have more energy in the mornings (things like sermon prep, for example) than in the afternoons. In the afternoons, I leave things that don’t require me to have a lot of energy (things like administrative tasks, for example).

When I’m not intentional with my schedule, I find that I do low-energy tasks during high energy times—emails in the morning, for example. Then, when I need lots of energy to take on a high energy task—like sermon prepping in the afternoon—I don’t have the energy to do it.

When you plan your day (even if your days almost never go as planned), plan your high-energy tasks for high-energy times and low-energy tasks for low-energy times.

4. Identify what gives and drains energy.

There are also some things on your schedule (or that could be on your schedule) that give and drain your energy. For example, meeting someone for coffee typically fills me with energy. Phone calls, however, typically drain my energy.

For you, maybe cooking a meal fills you with energy. Or maybe it’s a walk through the neighborhood. Or grabbing lunch with a co-worker.

On the other hand, maybe grocery shopping drains your energy. Or being in a meeting. Or helping your kids with homework.

Identify what gives and drains energy and then schedule your day accordingly. If you have a lot of tasks on your to-do list that drain your energy, spread them out over the week and intersperse some energizing appointments in between.

If I know that I have a lot of draining items on my schedule in a week and someone asks for an appointment that I know will be draining, I try to schedule it for the following week (unless it’s an emergency or crisis situation). This isn’t because I’m trying to be self-serving as a pastor; rather, it’s because I want to give the best of myself to those I’m serving. I can’t give the best of myself to someone when I’m deprived of energy.

5. Eat the frog.

There is an exception to what I’ve said above. Multiple bosses of mine have used the phrase “eat the frog” to talk about doing the thing you’ve been dreading doing for a week—maybe even multiple weeks. I don’t know where they got this phrase from, but it’s a helpful phrase for me.

If you had to eat a frog by the end of the day, you’d be dreading that all day. Sometimes there are tasks that you dread doing that end up taking energy throughout the day simply because you’re dreading them. Typically, I’ve learned, those tasks actually don’t take that long, so you’re giving up energy for a task that will be behind you in less than 30 minutes.

When you’ve identified a frog, just eat it, even if it isn’t during the “ideal” time of day that I talked about earlier. But just remember, not everything is a frog. So don’t treat everything like a frog.

6. Control Your Environment

Back to the pastoral care appointment I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. After I knew that a bunch of my energy had been spent, I decided to make a change to my day. Rather than preparing my sermon in my office like I usually do, I decided to go off-campus to a coffee shop in a neighboring town to crank out my sermon.

Essentially, what I did was control my environment as much as I could to preserve the energy I had left and needed to spend on sermon prep.

Controlling your environment is important no matter what you do. We live in a time when interruptions are prevalent at every moment of every day: phone calls, emails, knocks on your door; the list of interruptions is endless. Sometimes that interruption may be the most important thing in your day and therefore, the best way to spend your energy; other times, that interruption will take you away from the most important thing in your day, stealing too much energy for you to complete it when you’re back to it.

You can control your environment in many ways: close your office door, put your phone on silent, put on a TV show to keep your kids occupied, etc.

In fact, I wonder if that’s why we so often see Jesus going away to pray; when He was in highest demand, He knew that He needed to control His environment to do the thing that was most important for Him to do at that time.

7. Rearrange Your Schedule

When interruptions drain your energy significantly, you can rearrange your schedule as needed. Maybe you were planning to drop off your dry cleaning, but you know that you’ll have a 20-minute energy-zapping conversation there, so you plan to drop it off tomorrow. Maybe you choose to offer to your spouse that you can pick up the kids from soccer because that time in the car with them will be energizing for you. In some cases, you may even have to reschedule a meeting with someone because you know you don’t have enough energy to be emotionally present with them.

Whatever it looks like, know that you have permission to rearrange your schedule.

8. Add joy.

When I realize that I don’t have the energy I need for the day ahead, I try to add some joy into my day. Sometimes that means stopping at a coffee shop for coffee instead of making it at the office. Sometimes I’ll pick up the phone and call a friend. Other times, I’ll go for a walk outside.

When a day has been really draining, it can be easy to just lower our heads and try to tough it out the rest of the day. But energy isn’t just something we lose; it can also be something we gain. Learn the ways you get energized and remember them when you have a day that you need more energy.

9. Build in Breaks

Sometimes we don’t have enough energy in our day because we didn’t build in enough breaks in between our various tasks and obligations. We begin our day making breakfast for our family, then driving them to school, then walk into a meeting with our boss, then have a phone call with a client, before meeting a friend before lunch… and we wonder why we don’t have energy in the afternoons.

Take breaks throughout your day. Alternate high-energy with low-energy tasks. Make time to go on a walk or slowly drink a cup of coffee or talk to a friend. Build in time for prayer and meditation. And then see if your energy is better managed.

10. Prepare ahead.

Finally, look ahead to the coming day, week, and month to see when you need to add energy-giving tasks and when you need to spread out energy-draining tasks.

I’ve only recently started getting better at this, but as I have, it’s made a major difference in how well my energy is managed. Before I schedule an appointment, I look at the rest of the day and think, “Will I have time for this? Will I have energy for this?” If no to either, I find a different time to schedule it.

My wife and I have recently started to do this when we have a busy weekend. A busy weekend—while exciting and fun—can be quite draining. Recently, thanks to a suggestion from my counselor, we scheduled a time for us to each have alone time after a conference we went to. I can’t tell you how much of a difference that made for our energy going into the next week!

Whether you’re a pastor or stay-at-home parent or student or business owner, managing your energy is just as important as managing your time. But we don’t often focus on our energy as much as we focus on our time. My hope for you is that by managing your time and your energy, you’ll be able to do what’s most important for you while also being present to the people who are most important to you.

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