How well do you manage your energy?

This last Tuesday, I came back from work and played with my kids, mowed the lawn and then went out shopping with my family. I stayed awake till 11:00 p.m. and watched a movie on Netflix. This is quite unusual for me. Typically, I am beat after my 50-mile commute each way and have very little energy left at the end of the day.

I started to think about Tuesday a little bit more and discovered that I had managed to conserve my energy well that day. I had a good night's sleep, had an interesting problem to engage my mind at work and went out to eat with my colleagues and had a good time discussing about the fun things that we did this summer.

The next day, I got a twitter message from CNN Money about the need to take a break at lunch hour and make a concerted effort to manage our energy at work. I then visited the website titled the Energy Project and learned that managing energy is even more important than managing time in this day and age. I took the quiz and found out that I had an imminent energy crisis as I scored 13/20. (less than 5 is required to be fully energized). I plan to implement some of their suggestions and benefit from them. See if you can find out how to improve your energy efficiency.

Email Control

On any given day I get about 60-75 emails, of which there are 25 to 30 that need follow-up action on my part. This might not seem like much to many, but I have been struggling to stay on top of this. Invariably, when there are these many emails and you let a couple of them slip or slide, people start sending you reminder emails. These reminders tend to aggravate me, and I start to focus on them at the cost of letting other important mails slip. This has become a vicious cycle.

Recently I have discovered a few of things that are helping me. First, do not work with your email inbox open and actively connected /synchronized to the server. Second, download the emails about 2-3 times a day and make sure that you open every email once and once only. Third, start to open and deal with the emails from the bottom to the top (first in first out). This step requires some deal of discipline. Once you open the email -- disposition it! Do not leave it sitting in the inbox. Either delete it or delegate it to the appropriate party or file it in the appropriate folder for future reference. Usually you need to file it in the folder that suggests itself in the first 5-10 seconds.

Try this approach and see if you can get a handle on this email overload. It is one of the primary stressors in this day and age and the sooner we learn to deal with it effectively the better off we will be!

Let me know if it is working for you.