The gist: Energy management needs to come before any other productivity system. To explain why, in this post we compare energy management vs. time management, project management, and task management.
Do you ever time block your day, swear you’ll still to the schedule this time, yet still abandon it before lunch?
It’s probably because surface-level time management practices like that aren’t as “game-changing” as neurotypical productivity experts make them out to be.
Without a foundation of energy management, time blocking is useless because you don’t know what or when those time blocks should actually be for you to work productively.
That’s just one reason I believe energy management is THE most important productivity system, especially if you’re neurodivergent, chronically ill, or have any other energy constraints.
You've probably heard me talk about energy management before, because I freaking love it. It has been so revolutionary to my life, work, and well, energy.
But today, I specifically want to focus on why energy management is so important and needs to be prioritized above implementing any other productivity or self-care strategy.
First, let's back up...
What is Energy Management?
As we explain in our intro to energy management, energy management means matching what you do to your natural energy rhythms and patterns.
Most productivity and planning advice talks about choosing what tasks you need to do or projects you need to work on based on what's most important or how much time you have. But that assumes that you'll have the right kind and amount of energy needed for that task whenever you plan it for.
For most people, and especially people with energy limitations, that kind of consistent and predictable energy is far from reality.
Energy management takes that into account, and focuses on prioritizing awareness of, planning around, and adapting to the energy you actually have, and finding tasks that naturally match.
It can also help to think about managing different “categories” of energy, instead of one big vague thing, like:
- Physical: your capacity to move and exert yourself
- Mental: your ability to focus and think clearly
- Emotional: your capacity to regulate your emotions
- Social: how much interaction you can handle
At any given moment, you might have tons of one type of energy but little of others, or you might be low in every kind or category.
So now that we're clear on what I mean by energy management, let's talk about why it needs to be prioritized over other productivity systems, like time management or project management.
Energy Management vs. Time Management
In general, the reason managing your energy needs to come first is because it's as much of a self-awareness exercise as it is a productivity tactic.
Learning your energy levels requires learning about yourself. And when you know yourself better, you can apply these other strategies to your life better.
For example, let's look at time management.
If your primary productivity technique is time management, using calendar blocking and tactics like that, the success of the entire system hinges on being able to accurately estimate how long different things take for you.
But how long a task takes for you depends on your energy levels.
Have you ever tried to do something that you know should take 5 minutes but instead it takes an hour?
It's a mistake so common it has a name: the planning fallacy.
And one of the many contributing factors to it?
The time that something will take depends on the energy you have for it. 
So if you're trying to manage your time without a good grasp on managing your energy, it's not going to be as accurate or efficient.
You're going to run out of time on tasks you don't have the energy for, and if you're living by your calendar, that means you're moving onto the next thing not having finished what you planned.
Understand Your Energy Levels
If you're ready to start using energy management to make work easier, download our free energy tracker to get started!
Energy Management vs. Project Management
Now that we've covered energy management vs. time management, let's look at it compared to project management.
First of all, being able to plan and manage your projects requires being able to plan and manage your time, so it's kind of like a chain or hierarchy.
Everything builds on each other, starting with energy.
Also, knowing how to plan projects, especially knowing how to stack them on top of each other and manage multiple projects at a time, requires knowing your energy.
For example, I have figured out through trial and error that when I'm doing my monthly planning,
I can handle 2 big-ish projects that require multiple types of energy. Or I can do 1 of those and 2 or so smaller more creativity-focused projects, or up to 4 small admin projects.
So I know when I'm pulling projects from my quarterly plan to schedule into specific months and weeks, I need to sort of assemble those lego pieces accordingly.
Like, the month I'm recording this I'm also working on updating one of the courses in the Work Brighter shop, the energy management one actually.
And that's a bigger project.
That requires admin and tech work, or what for me is shallow work, as well as the deeper work of script writing and video creation and cheat sheet design and stuff like that.
So I didn't plan any other high energy projects this month, instead I'm working on smaller things like updating my email marketing software's backend setup, which will only take an afternoon or two.
If I tried to say, update two courses in one month, or update one course plus batch video content for my YouTube channel, I would run out of the right kinds of energy and end up finishing nothing, despite how theoretically well-planned the projects are.
Because energy management needs to come before project management.
If you organize your work around projects, they'll stall out when you run out of the kinds of energies needed. That stall out can then easily lead to burnout.
Whereas when you have that foundation of energy management first, you can make sure the projects you're working on complement each other in terms of energy.
So like, when you're low on creative energy for the one project you need that for, you have something else you can switch to.
Energy Management vs. Task Management
The same thing is true with task management, as it's a subset of project management.
I'll keep this point brief because most of the reasoning has already been explained in my points on time management and project management.
Basically, without energy management, you just don't know how completing a task is going to go.
But let's look at what that looks like if you're using tasks management as your main productivity strategy, without managing your energy as well..
In that case, you don't know how long it's going to take.
And like I said earlier, if you primarily organize your work around your calendar, that means on tasks you don't like the energy for, you're going to move onto your next time block without having finished your work.
If you primarily organize your around tasks, working without energy alignment might look like going to write an email you think will take five minutes. But because of a lack of the right energy, you're still there writing the same email an hour later, other things you'd planned with your day be damned.
Manage your energy, not your time
When you manage your energy first, managing everything else gets easier, because you're not trying to fight against your natural state.
If you're ready to try it out, a great first step is to experiment with energy tracking:
Understand Your Energy Levels
If you're ready to start using energy management to make work easier, download our free energy tracker to get started!