It's About Learning

My son Caleb and I have been rereading The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance and we are both exploring how to apply the key principles of engagement management vs continuing to fail at attempting to manage time. I am writing this post in a 90-minute engagement cycle and will be shifting to a purposeful 20-minute break when my timer goes off and then focus on another type of energy I need to be productive. The key idea that Schartz points to is that energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance which is at the heart of this process which was first established in a book co-written with Jim Loehr’s, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. I explored the ideas in this book back in 2010 and recently reread portions to remind myself of the 4 energy management principles that drive performance in my pursuit of finding a sustainable balance in my productivity.

• Principle 1: Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
• Principle 2: Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
• Principle 3: To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
• Principle 4: Positive energy rituals—highly specific routines for managing energy— are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

To implement these principles effectively you have to begin with finding a balance between physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. More specifically, you have to replenish one type of energy by either doing something to restore that energy and/or by switching to an expenditure of another type of energy. For example, after my 90-minute cognitive focus on writing this post, I will be shifting to building up my spiritual energy by taking in and meditating on a spiritually uplifting talk on YouTube. I will then shift my focus to building my physical capacity by going on a HIIT run. I listen to audiobooks on my runs and workouts so I can also build myself up mentally while challenging myself physically. Some time spent with my family in the afternoon will restore my emotional energy so that when I return to writing or creating I will have been replenished emotionally and mentally and can then approach more writing or creation with full engagement. Finding a balance in these types of energy use and replenishment is the key to my productivity and performance. I wish I could say that I have come to this understanding quickly and easily.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case, and my journey to engagement management prefaced by several decades of failing at time management. I have been looking for the key to time management since the early to mid-’80s when I first started trying to implement Blanchard’s One Minute Manager. After more than a decade of failing to make this work, I shifted to David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) in 2006 and my Evernote still has the foundational structure of GTD for my main notebooks. I have also experimented with a wide assortment of GTD oriented tasks or ToDo list applications. Other than the GTD structure that I use to organize my Evernote notebooks about the only other GTD method I use is the GTD rule of doing something immediately if it will take 2 minutes or less. The challenge I have always found with GTD is that it takes so much time and energy to set it up properly and it also takes significant time and effort to implement consistently. I was never really able to use it completely or properly and I found that the time I spent trying to make GTD work could be better spent on actually doing what I needed to do.

As result in 2009, I turned to Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog which is now in its third edition. Both GTD and Eat That Frog emphasize time management but Tracy better recognized that people have limited willpower or discipline to build and maintain a sophisticated GTD structure and methodology so he advocated that people do the most pressing task that they were not looking forward to first…hence the title Eat that Frog. Tracy also advocates for a prioritization structure not unlike the GTD structure be used to organize your other tasks. I have listened to and reread Eat That Frog multiple times and while I did manage to eat many frogs while attempting to use the Eat That Frog methodology I really didn’t get beyond this first idea. One of the other key insights I gained from Tracy was his emphasis on the notion of having limited stores of willpower and that the best way to preserve those stores was to set up a process that would become habits that would enable one to what they desired because of habituation and preserve the limited willpower stores for other things like eating that frog.

This led me to explore Charles Duhigg’s ideas in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business in 2014. Duhigg argued that since more than 40% of what we do each day is a result of habitation it made sense to explore how this worked. He identified the habit loop which consists of a cue, a routine, and then a reward as the key to understanding how habits work and how to change them. Duhigg also argued that habits never really disappear so to change or replace a habit you have to first identify the habit loop and then change the habit or routine by isolating the cue and then choosing a new routine or behavior that will deliver a reward that you are craving. While this behaviorist approach does explain why we continue to do the things we do or don’t want to and it does offer a way to change habits, it was just too difficult to implement from a time management perspective.

Even when I looked into Stephen Guise arguments in Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results like putting your shoes and gym clothes by your bed so that the first thing you do when you wake up is put them on a go to the gym or go for a run, I was able to improve on my work out consistency but I wasn’t able to effectively apply these ideas to my time and productivity management. While exploring habits, mini habits, and willpower I turned to Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Once again just knowing more about willpower and the mechanism behind habituation didn’t really give me the ability to make changes to my time management. Even though it makes sense that we have 3 kinds of willpower, that being able to differentiate between “I won’t” “I will” and “I want” power and the notion that we can train our biological willpower like a muscle, I just wasn’t able to put this into practice. McGonigal did point to the notion of finding a balance of eating well, exercising, meditating, getting enough sleep, and spending time with people who are positive influences as a way to build willpower. I started noticing this similar pattern of addressing or finding a balance in more holistic variables as a way to build willpower or energy.

I really appreciated McGonigal’s writing so when she put out her book Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It in early 2016 began my trip down the rabbit trail on exploring stress. McGonigal argues that stress is only harmful to your health if you believe it is, that happy lives include stress and that you can use stress to boost your performance. This notion of using the energy of stress to change the negative self talk into something positive and using that energy to make things happen reminded me of many of the key ideas from The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.

I reread this book in 2017 and again in 2018 and for the past couple of years have been working at finding a balance expending and replenishing my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. I have taken a relatively holistic approach and have scheduled my writing time for first thing in the morning and have also been very consistent in my workouts, and my nutrition. I have always set aside time for my family and I do regularly address my spiritual needs through readings, prayer, and meeting with others who hold similar beliefs. In the past several years I have incorporated a 90-minute sleep cycle approach to match my body’s natural circadian rhythms and I have never slept better. Now, I am applying a similar approach to my waking hours and my ultradian rhythms thanks to the insights shared by Schartz in The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance.

Schartz points to the work of the “father or sleep” Nathaniel Kleitman who discovered rapid eye movement (REM) and proposed that sleep included active brain processes. Kleitman also discovered that a Basic Rest Activity Cycle (BRAC) is present when people are awake and is part of our ultradian cycles. These cycles involve alternating 90 minutes periods of high-frequency brain activity followed by lower-frequency brain activity that lasts for about 20 minutes. The key to the highest levels of productivity is to engage in highly focused creativity or deliberate practice during this 90 minute period and then take a break by doing something physical, emotional, or spiritual in the 20 minute break period. Schartz also points to the work of authority on deliberate practice by Anders Ericsson who found that the most successful musicians or athletes engaged in an average of 4-4.5 hours a day of practice that was broken up with a few shorter breaks. It appears that these people have found their highest level of productivity in the natural rhythm in 3 cycles.

In the final analysis and synthesis, I have found that when I combine 90-minute cycles of intense focus with shorter cycles of exercise I am completely engaged and highly productive. I am also finding that if I can get 2-3 of these cycles in first thing in the morning I am much more productive than I have ever been before. I am not only more productive I can analyze, evaluate, and synthesize ideas more efficiently and can write or create more effectively. The power of full engagement is really finding a balance in the expenditure and replenishing of one’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. It has taken me too many years to learn that time management really doesn’t work and there is no simple solution, quick fix, or just a matter of disciplining oneself to eat that frog. The key is to address all aspects of our humanity, find that balance and take into account all the factors that are necessary to be as complete and as productive as we were intended to be.

References

Allen, D. (2002). Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity. Penguin Books.
Blanchard, K., & Johnson, S. (n.d.). The one minute manager. Berkley Publishing Group.
Brian, T. (2007). Eat that Frog!: 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business (Vol. 34). Random House.
Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Duhigg, C. (2016). Smarter faster better: The secrets of being productive. Random House.
Guise, S. (2013). Mini habits: Smaller habits, bigger results. Selective Entertainment LLC.
Loehr, J. E., & Schwartz, T. (2005). The power of full engagement: Managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal. Simon and Schuster.
McGonigal, K. (2011). The willpower instinct: How self-control works, why it matters, and what you can do to get more of it. Penguin.
McGonigal, K. (2016). The upside of stress: Why stress is good for you, and how to get good at it. Penguin.
Schwartz, T., Gomes, J., & McCarthy, C. (2010). The way we’re working isn’t working: The four forgotten needs that energize great performance. Simon and Schuster Audio.