Latest / Career Coaching with Fexingo: Professional Coaches, Career Counselors, and Guidance for Workers / How a Career Energy Audit Reveals Your Professional Exhaustion
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about something I’ve been experimenting with lately — a career energy audit. The idea is to track, hour by hour, which parts of your workday give you energy and which ones drain it. It sounds simple, but the results can be pretty eye-opening. Luna: I’ve heard of energy audits in the context of buildings — like checking where heat leaks out. But for a career? How does that work? Lucas: So the framework I’ve been using comes from executive coach Laura Garnett. She advises clients to log their energy levels every hour for one full workweek. You rate each hour on a scale from one to ten — one being completely drained, ten being fully energized. Then you categorize the task: meeting, email, deep work, whatever it is. Luna: And what do people typically find? Lucas: The surprises are usually in the small stuff. One client discovered that a fifteen-minute check-in with a specific direct report drained her more than a two-hour strategy session. She had no idea until she saw the data. Another found that reading industry reports — which she thought was a chore — actually scored consistently high on energy. So she started blocking time for it. Luna: It’s like a time audit, but focused on the feeling. I’ve seen research from Harvard Business Review that employees who did this for a week reported a twenty-three percent increase in job satisfaction within three months. That’s a huge shift from just one week of tracking. Lucas: Exactly. And the key is not just to track, but to act on it. Once you have the data, you can start redesigning your week. Maybe you batch your draining tasks together and handle them early, when your energy is highest. Or you shift your most energizing work to the afternoon, if that’s when you naturally spike. Luna: What about tasks that are necessary but draining? Like performance reviews or expense reports. You can’t just drop them. Lucas: Right, you can’t eliminate everything. But you can change the conditions. For example, if expense reports drain you, maybe you do them while listening to a podcast you love, or you pair them with a coffee ritual. Laura Garnett calls that ‘energy pairing’ — attaching a small energizing activity to a depleting one. Luna: That’s clever. And it’s different from the typical advice of ‘just power through.’ This is actually strategic. Lucas: We should also talk about a common pitfall: confusing boredom with depletion. Some tasks score low not because they’re exhausting, but because they’re monotonous. That’s a different problem. Boredom might mean you need more challenge, not less of that task. Luna: So the audit helps you distinguish between ‘this task needs to go’ and ‘this task needs a tweak.’ Lucas: Exactly. And I think that’s where a lot of career advice falls short — it tells you to follow your passion, but that’s too broad. An energy audit gives you specific data points. You can say, ‘I actually love client presentations but hate the prep work.’ Then you find someone else on your team who loves prep but hates presenting. Suddenly you have a partnership. Luna: That’s a whole different way to think about delegation. It’s not about dumping work you don’t like — it’s about trading tasks based on energy profiles. Lucas: Right. And that makes teams more efficient, too. One person’s drain is another’s fuel. Luna: I want to try this myself. What’s the simplest way to start? Do I need a special app? Lucas: No, a simple spreadsheet or even a notebook works. Set an alarm for every hour. When it goes off, write down what you were doing and rate your energy from one to ten. Do it for five consecutive workdays. At the end of the week, look for patterns. Which tasks cluster around the low numbers? Which around the high? Luna: And you recommend doing this even if you don’t feel particularly drained? As a preventive measure? Lucas: Absolutely. In fact, the best time to do it is when you’re feeling fine, because then you can catch small frictions before they become big problems. I did mine in a relatively calm month, and I still found that a weekly status meeting I thought was fine was actually a steady seven on the drain scale. I asked to switch to async updates, and it freed up an hour a week. Luna: One hour a week adds up. That’s fifty hours a year. Lucas: Exactly. And that’s the thing — we often accept small drains as just part of the job, but they compound. An energy audit makes the invisible visible. Luna: It’s like looking under the hood. And since we’re talking about tools that actually improve your work life without requiring a job change — this fits perfectly with what we try to do on this show. Lucas: Speaking of which — we deliberately keep this show free of ads. No sponsors, no affiliates. If you’ve found these episodes useful for thinking through a career move or decision, and you want to support that idea, there’s a simple way to do it. Luna: Yeah, we’ve always believed that career advice shouldn’t be interrupted by commercials. So if you appreciate that, you can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just an option. Lucas: And that support helps us keep doing what we’re doing. Now, let’s get back to the energy audit. One more thing I want to mention: after you’ve done your week of tracking, look for what Garnett calls ‘energy anchors’ — tasks that consistently score high. Those are your strengths. They’re not just enjoyable, they’re where you add the most value. Luna: So the audit doesn’t just tell you what to avoid. It tells you what to double down on. Lucas: Exactly. And that’s the real payoff. Most of us spend our careers trying to fix weaknesses. The energy audit flips that — it says, ‘Here’s what fuels you. Do more of that.’ It’s a subtle but powerful shift. Luna: I’m starting mine tomorrow. And I’ll report back. Lucas: I’d love to hear what you find. For our listeners, if you try it, let us know — we’re always curious about what patterns people discover. Luna: And maybe you’ll find that your job is actually better than you think, once you rearrange the pieces. Lucas: That’s the hope. Sometimes the fix isn’t a new job — it’s a new schedule.