Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 276 | How to Guard Energy During the Week

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Ep. 276 | How to Guard Energy During the Week · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  If you want to crush my day, don't give me a meeting at all. No matter when it's in the day. What's up, guys? Welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. So one of my favorite hacks when it comes to rhythms, what I like to tweak and retweak and try and retry, is trying to figure out the right time during the day and the week for certain activities and making sure that I'm finding ways for them to match
• 0:27
  the energy that I'm typically feeling at that time of the week or that time of the day. Now, this is a huge critical tool for people who, if you're saying, oh my gosh, I do not have energy for my rhythm. Like, I know I've got this much to do, but I'm at a low energy place in life, or I'm always struggling with energy. That's just a struggle that I constantly have. I would say that that's definitely...
• 0:53
  one of the themes of what I've wrestled with in terms of productivity is that I struggle a lot with having, I can't just manufacture creative energy during certain times of the day or productive energy or a lot of it's extroverted energy for meetings and stuff like that. But I've discovered that if I try to sync up those different activities and
• 1:19
  At different times of the day, it really has helped me. A bunch of examples for me is I can do meetings way better in the afternoon than early in the morning. If you want to crush my day energy-wise, just destroy it. Then schedule a meeting for me, any kind of meeting with another person before 9 a.m. And my day, my energy for my day is just like...
• 1:41
  It bankruptcy. Um, I'm really sensitive in that way for some weird, weird, weird reason. And I know other people that are not, everybody has that problem. Um, I really wish I were a morning person like you, Jeff, you don't mind having those five 30 meetings for some reason. That's true at some level, but I was going to say, but from a creative energy standpoint, if you want to crush my day, don't give me a meeting at all.
• 2:03
  No matter when it's in the day. But yeah, no, I can sustain the energy in the early morning for sure, but I don't tend to love meetings. I like that, keep that for myself. Yes. Or five-minute fatherhood. Yeah, I know. So, and there are people that really thrive on the energy for those meetings. And so you have to...
• 2:19
  So if you're going into low energy, you want to schedule meetings for those low energy, you know, places where you need to start ramping up, essentially. Yeah. So what I'm always constantly thinking about is what what what kind of activities drain me? What kind of activities give me more energy? Like another weird example that I discovered about myself is that.
• 2:39
  If I work out in the morning, it drains my energy. But if I work out after lunch, it gives me energy. I don't know why that is, but I figured that out. It took me like 10 years to figure that out. And it was a massive game changer. Now, I know that different guys, you have different abilities to tweak your schedule. If you're an employee somewhere and you have a boss and everything's sort of completely situated for you and you have to...
• 3:04
  totally submit to whatever the company rhythm is, then you don't have a lot of this options. But for a lot of guys who are working from home now, especially due to the crisis, this is an opportunity for you to sort of Lego brick your schedule a little bit and just sort of move the pieces around and say, okay, what happens if I schedule meetings over here? What happens if I
• 3:26
  you know, do that project early in the morning or, you know, right after lunch or right before lunch or, you know, and you start to notice things. And again, this is a huge deal if you find that the resource that is most scarce in your life is energy. And there's a certain percentage of people where that's their constant battle. So I just want to encourage you guys, if that's your constant battle, identify that and understand that there's a great tool for dealing with that. And that is
• 3:54
  really tweak your daily and weekly rhythm until you discover the right way to order things. And if you find that that's a really big problem for you, then you're going to need to get more control of your schedule. If you have that problem and then you give control of your schedule to a job or to something else, then it's difficult to fix this problem.
• 4:14
  And so I've noticed that people that have this issue need to get control of their schedule, but then they have to be extremely disciplined not to, you know, sort of just exist in a low state of productivity and energy day in and day out. So it's figuring out that sweet spot. But I would say that that's been a really critical thing for me to figure out matching events with the energy that I'm feeling typically at that time or at the time of the week.
• 4:42
  Yeah, exactly. And I would just add to, you know, I just am more really mindful to have just like wastefulness, you know, like, and I don't think I have to, like, I don't try to be super productive, productive. I don't think every single day has to dominate. But I do start feeling sensitive to like, oh, that's a wasteful chunk, because of how I allocated it or because of my energy, usually.
• 5:01
  And I'm a guy who, yeah, I have to take a little short nap every single day because I like, I don't know, I even got tested to see if I was anemic years ago and all that. Like I just so my energy levels are very specific. And so I have to tweak them and work on them. And I think a lot of guys, we just a lot of people, we just assume the day is the same. And it's like, yeah, you actually can have a radically different day based on how you try to set it up with certain things that will push you, pull you, you know, higher energy, low energy, et cetera. So I think, yeah, that's just something to be mindful of.
• 5:26
  Yeah. A whole nother topic you could get into is the food side of this. Do you eat a big breakfast? Do you skip breakfast? Do you eat a big lunch? Do you skip lunch? Just notice how things are impacting your energy. Be very, very observant of that part of you if this is your struggle and this has been a big struggle.
• 5:44
  for me. So if you guys, another place we'd love for you guys to like learn about all kinds of tips and things we're working on is on Instagram. We have a really active page on Instagram, so you can jump on there, family teams. Also, if you guys have pictures you're taking of your family, like implementing things that we're talking about, use the hashtag family teams.
• 6:04
  I'm following that hashtag. We follow that. I love seeing different families and just what they're doing. It's not a very frequently used hashtag, so we can use it for our stuff. But I'd love to see what your family's implementing, different things you're trying, different sort of special moments where things are working out for you. So follow us on Instagram at Family Teams and then use that hashtag.