Speaker 1: It's three point thirty in the afternoon and you have
Speaker 1: hit a wall. We've just had a long, very cerebral
Speaker 1: meeting and now you've got to back it up with
Speaker 1: some pretty intellectually demanding writing work. But you're exhausted. Now,
Speaker 1: before you reach for the can of red bull or
Speaker 1: that block of chocolate, you might want to have a
Speaker 1: listen to what Holly Ransom has to say about energy.
Speaker 1: Holly is a full Bright scholar and the author of
Speaker 1: The Leading Edge, and she says that there's a different
Speaker 1: way to perk up when you're running low on energy.
Speaker 1: The red bulls, the half later cups of coffee, and
Speaker 1: the sugary snacks might feel like they're working, but they're
Speaker 1: really just numbing the signals your body is trying to
Speaker 1: send you. So how can we manage our energy levels naturally?
Speaker 1: My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist
Speaker 1: and the founder of Behave val Science Consultancy Inventium, and
Speaker 1: this is how I work, a show about how to
Speaker 1: help you do your best work. On Today is my
Speaker 1: Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from
Speaker 1: the past and I pick out my favorite tip from
Speaker 1: the interview. In today's show, I speak with Holly Ransom
Speaker 1: about why and how she does an energy audit.
Speaker 2: An energy audit for me is as simple as get
Speaker 2: a notebook and have a page where you just write
Speaker 2: some bullet points of things, being curious about your energy
Speaker 2: and what you observe. So I know, naturally I'm a
Speaker 2: really very much high energy in the morning. I absolutely
Speaker 2: hit a wall. In the kind of mid to late afternoon.
Speaker 2: I'm just a no go between about like three point
Speaker 2: thirty and five or three and five, like it's a
Speaker 2: really dead zone for me. And then I have this
Speaker 2: incredible burst of energy and kind of the mid evening
Speaker 2: again as well. And so it's changed the way that
Speaker 2: I think about structuring my days because, for example, I
Speaker 2: try to make sure I never get up and get
Speaker 2: straight on email. And that was something I learned from,
Speaker 2: you know, Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Speaker 2: You know that learning that difference between urgent and important
Speaker 2: and making sure that the urgent doesn't take the place
Speaker 2: of the important. So when I get up and I've
Speaker 2: got energy to go, I want to be putting into
Speaker 2: things that are important. They're going to be stuff that
Speaker 2: are to do with my goals that are going to
Speaker 2: help me step towards things that really matter to me.
Speaker 2: They're things that I've got to put a lot of
Speaker 2: thought into. Maybe it's a proposal for a new idea.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's thinking through how I could structure up a
Speaker 2: collaboration with someone I'm really excited about working with. But
Speaker 2: it's not going to be sitting through my emails, or
Speaker 2: it's not going to be choosing to audit my expenses
Speaker 2: or something like that. You know, They're going to be
Speaker 2: things I know I have to do them absolutely, but
Speaker 2: I'm going to try and do them at points in
Speaker 2: the day where I've got a natural kind of energy
Speaker 2: low or I'm not needing as much of kind of
Speaker 2: the energy I bring to bear on other topics or
Speaker 2: need to bring to bear on other topics. I think
Speaker 2: the other thing I've noticed is, you know, and this
Speaker 2: is true of what we've learned for some time about
Speaker 2: attention spans and stuff like that, Like I do see
Speaker 2: that I'm at the end of ninety minutes often needing
Speaker 2: just a little bit of a perk up and a reboot.
Speaker 2: So that's where I've started inserting these micro brakes. Whether
Speaker 2: it is as simple as I'm going to do ten
Speaker 2: jump squads, like literally in the room I'm still in,
Speaker 2: just to re energize and shake my body awake. Sometimes
Speaker 2: if it's been a particularly you know, intense like cerebral meeting,
Speaker 2: or I'm just feeling a little bit drained mentally, I'll
Speaker 2: sit there and I'll do ten deep breaths. You know,
Speaker 2: where one of those apple watches where it can do
Speaker 2: them for you, or it can guide you through them
Speaker 2: in terms of the ease of doing that. So just
Speaker 2: finding those little ways of intervening in those moments, because
Speaker 2: all of us have got things in the day that
Speaker 2: do drainers. We can't avoid any of that. It's about
Speaker 2: how we strategize and put these things around that so
Speaker 2: that we can re energize ourselves and come out of
Speaker 2: those logs. And we don't need red bulls and you know,
Speaker 2: the three point thirty eightis snacks and things like that
Speaker 2: to do it, because ofterently, all we're doing there is
Speaker 2: is kind of numbing a sensation our body is trying
Speaker 2: to tell us and using kind of an artificial way
Speaker 2: of kind of pushing through it. So thinking about how
Speaker 2: to actually start to be the energy for ourselves. It's
Speaker 2: just been a really profound way that I've shifted managing
Speaker 2: my day and week in the last six years, probably,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't be more happy with the results, and
Speaker 2: I couldn't be a bigger believer in this idea.
Speaker 1: Now when I think of you, Holly, I'm like, it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine you having these low energy periods because
Speaker 1: I feel like you're such a high energy, high achieving person.
Speaker 1: But what do you do to switch off or relax?
Speaker 1: Do you have rituals or practices around that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, And it's something I have historically. Like I say,
Speaker 2: this is something that I've learned in my more recent history,
Speaker 2: so the last five or so years. It's definitely not
Speaker 2: something I was all that good add in my sort
Speaker 2: of early twenties. So it's been a learned habit and
Speaker 2: something I've come to understand that if you don't look
Speaker 2: after yourself and you don't really properly recharge that productive
Speaker 2: downtime where you're actually allowing yourself to restore, you're very
Speaker 2: hard to do anything at any kind of intensity for
Speaker 2: any serious length of time. And I guess, as well
Speaker 2: as the stats on what we see about burnout probably
Speaker 2: suggest a lot of us are struggling with the same thing,
Speaker 2: you know. For me switching off, I've become a lot
Speaker 2: better at it, and I think it's the great intervention
Speaker 2: of my partner. We're really good about not letting work
Speaker 2: blur into the evenings and really safeguarding our weekends, and
Speaker 2: I think that's been really good, the discipline and the
Speaker 2: accountability we give each other in that it doesn't mean
Speaker 2: every now and again something urgently pops up, sure, but
Speaker 2: on the whole weekends of weekends, weekends of a quality
Speaker 2: time there for friends, there for being active, there for
Speaker 2: getting out and being part of whether a sport or
Speaker 2: cultural events. We try and make sure that their time
Speaker 2: out so that when we start Monday again, we're really
Speaker 2: hitting the ground running with the energy that we need
Speaker 2: for that week ahead. I think one of the other
Speaker 2: things we've been playing with this year that I've found
Speaker 2: really beneficial is phone free Friday nights, which sounds so silly,
Speaker 2: but that idea of the of switching off from a week,
Speaker 2: putting the phone down at five o'clock and not turning
Speaker 2: it on till Saturday morning, and just that absence of notification,
Speaker 2: that ability to properly switch off because the work week
Speaker 2: isn't continuing to linger into your Friday night and then
Speaker 2: you know, spill over into the weekend. I've just really
Speaker 2: enjoyed that complete disconnect from tech. You know, it's only
Speaker 2: for what it would it be, I guess eighteen hours
Speaker 2: or something like that we really turn it off for.
Speaker 2: But that's been fantastic. So I encourage people to find
Speaker 2: little ways of putting tech breaks into because we've just
Speaker 2: found that to be really beneficial and you just realize
Speaker 2: how how connected you out of the thing the rest
Speaker 2: of the time. So that ability to properly disconnect has
Speaker 2: been a great one.
Speaker 1: That is it for today. Now, if you're looking for
Speaker 1: more tips to improve the way that you work, I
Speaker 1: write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things
Speaker 1: that I've discovered that helped me work better, which range
Speaker 1: from interesting research findings through the gadgets that I'm loving.
Speaker 1: You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot cotwork
Speaker 1: dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventium with
Speaker 1: production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to
Speaker 1: Martin Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode
Speaker 1: and makes everything sound so much better than it would
Speaker 1: have otherwise. See you next time.