Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Manage Their Energy Not Just Their Time
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about something a lot of new-manager advice gets wrong. We talk about time management constantly — block your calendar, triage your inbox, protect your focus hours. But there's a deeper bottleneck that almost nobody addresses. Luna: Let me guess — it's not about hours in the day, it's about the fuel to fill them. Lucas: Exactly. Energy. Not just physical energy — cognitive, emotional, social. I was reading some research from the Harvard Business Review on what they call 'attentional depletion.' A typical manager makes something like 300 decisions a day. Every one of those decisions draws from the same finite reservoir. By 3 PM, you're not making worse decisions because you're lazy. You're making worse decisions because your tank is empty. Luna: And for a new manager — especially someone who just got promoted from peer to boss — the drain is even faster, right? Because you're still learning the role, you're absorbing your team's anxiety, you're second-guessing every email. Lucas: Right. There's a term I like from a Stanford professor named Baba Shiv. He talks about 'cognitive load' — and the thing that surprised me is that emotional regulation uses the same neural circuitry as complex problem-solving. So when you spend an hour managing a tense conversation with a former colleague who now reports to you, you've depleted the same mental fuel you need for strategic thinking later. Luna: That's actually a huge insight. So it's not just that you're tired — it's that the emotional work literally crowds out the analytical work. Lucas: Precisely. And here's where the practical advice comes in. I interviewed a senior engineering director at a mid-size SaaS company — she's been a manager for about eight years — and she told me something that stuck. She said the best thing she did in her first 90 days was to stop trying to be available all the time. She started scheduling two 'recovery blocks' per week. Not for meetings, not for catch-up email. One was for deep thinking — a problem she'd been avoiding. The other was literally a walk outside. No phone. She protected those blocks like she would a 1-1 with her own boss. Luna: I love that — recovery blocks. Because most new managers feel like they have to say yes to everything. Team members pop by, Slack messages pile up, and they feel guilty if they're not responsive. But the director was basically modeling sustainable work for her team. Lucas: And that's the subtlety, right? She wasn't being lazy — she was being strategic about which hours she guarded. The research backs it up. There's a well-known study from the Journal of Applied Psychology that found managers who took short, deliberate breaks had teams that reported higher trust and lower turnover. Because when a leader is frazzled, the team feels it. Luna: So the question becomes — how do you identify where your energy is actually going? You can't manage what you don't measure. Lucas: Exactly. I want to offer listeners a very specific tool. I call it the 90-Day Energy Audit. It takes fifteen minutes every Friday. Three questions. First: What type of work drained me most this week? Was it cognitive — like reading a dense report? Emotional — like a difficult conversation? Or social — like navigating a cross-team meeting? Second: What gave me energy? That one's easy to skip, but it's crucial. Third: What's one thing I can change next week to protect my energy? That's it. Luna: That's really concrete. And I imagine the answers change as you settle into the role. In week two, the drain might be learning the company's jargon. By week ten, it might be managing a conflict between two team members. Lucas: Totally. And the audit surfaces patterns you wouldn't notice otherwise. I had a listener who did this and realized she was spending three hours a week rewriting other people's slides — not because she had to, but because she was a perfectionist. She delegated that to a team member who actually enjoyed design work, and freed up a whole afternoon. Luna: That's a perfect example. Look, if today's episode gave you a practical tool to use this Friday, that's exactly what we're here for. And just a quick acknowledgment — the reason we can keep this show ad-free and focused on actionable content is because listeners who find it valuable sometimes choose to support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure at all — but if you've gotten something out of this conversation, that's the way to keep it going. Lucas: Yeah, and honestly, the energy audit alone — if you do it for four weeks, you'll have a completely different picture of your leadership than when you started. I'd love to hear how it goes. Now, let's talk about one more layer: the difference between cognitive, emotional, and social energy, because they require different recovery strategies. Luna: Okay, break those down for me. Cognitive seems straightforward — reading, analyzing, deciding. Lucas: Sure. Cognitive energy is taxed by ambiguity, by learning new systems, by making decisions with incomplete information — which is basically a new manager's entire job. Recovery from cognitive drain requires what psychologist K. Anders Ericsson called 'deliberate rest' — doing something that requires zero analytical thought. A walk, a shower, a simple physical task. Not scrolling Twitter, because that still engages your brain. Luna: Interesting. So watching a nature video might be better than checking the news. Lucas: Exactly. Emotional energy is drained by things like performance conversations, delivering bad news, or even just absorbing a team member's frustration. Recovery from emotional drain requires what's sometimes called 'psychological distance' — literally shifting perspective. A quick exercise: imagine the situation from six months in the future. It shrinks the intensity. Luna: And social energy? That's the one I think gets overlooked. You can be an introvert or an extrovert, but managing people requires constant social interaction — and that's a muscle that gets fatigued. Lucas: One hundred percent. Social energy is drained by meetings where you're performing leadership — putting on a confident face when you don't feel it, navigating office politics, giving tough feedback. Recovery from social drain is often quiet time alone, or low-stakes social time with people who don't need anything from you. I know a manager who blocks the first thirty minutes of her lunch break as 'no talk' time — she eats at her desk with her headphones on, listening to music. Then she's ready for the afternoon. Luna: That's a small habit with a big return. So if I were a new manager listening, what's the one thing I should do this week? Lucas: Start the energy audit this Friday. Fifteen minutes. Three questions. Don't overthink it. And during the week, try one recovery block — even thirty minutes — to see what it feels like. The results won't be instant, but by week four, you'll notice you're less reactive, more patient, and probably making better calls. Luna: I love that it's not about doing more — it's about being smarter with the energy you have. New management is hard enough without running on empty. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the shift I wish more advice focused on. The first 90 days aren't a sprint — they're a marathon where the first mile sets your pace. If you burn out your energy reserves by week three, you'll spend the rest of the year playing catch-up. Luna: Alright — so to recap: three types of energy to watch, two recovery blocks a week, one fifteen-minute audit on Friday. That's a system even a overwhelmed new manager can start tomorrow. Lucas: That's the goal. Thanks for the conversation, Luna. And to everyone listening — good luck with those first ninety days. You've got a lot more capacity than you think — you just need to protect it.