As a leader, managing your time and energy expenditure is essential. But when it comes to the capacity equation, not all time holds equal value—particularly, your ability to discern how to allocate energy in a way that is impactful and fulfilling matters.

Sometimes, a workplace drains you because you’re simply in the wrong job for your personality and skills. If you thrive in varied, interactive, and fast-paced environments, then a role based on autonomy and structured routine work will not stimulate you. Likewise, if you need order, clear rules, and practical goals, you are going to be stressed in a context of spontaneity, frequent change, and vague directives.

But inside of any current leadership role, there’s also the subtler calibration of motivation and impact within how you spend your days. Being a leader involves making increasingly discerning choices on where you pour your own energy and where you draw upon delegation and support.

Your Time Is a Non-Renewable Asset

In the book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Time, and Build Your Empire, Dan Martell advises entrepreneurs on applying mindset shifts and systems that enable them to move from a do-it-all-yourself approach toward focusing primarily in high-value work that brings them energy and fulfillment.

Because no matter whether you’re an entrepreneur or a leader, trying to do everything yourself inhibits your ability to lead and cultivate growth. According to Martell, time is the only non-renewable asset, and you can’t afford to spend yours unwisely.

As an entrepreneur, this means that you reach a certain point where you are wise to “buy back your time” by hiring others to do routine and repetitive work so you can reclaim more freedom and energy for the high-value work you excel in and enjoy. When you free your time, the energy you have to pour back into the work increases.

As a leader within an organization, buying back your time may look different than to an entrepreneur, but the same principles apply. The question is how do you know what high-value work you both enjoy and excel at?

What Are Your Areas of Working Genius?

Assessment tools are priceless when it comes to gaining insight and self-awareness around your working style, such as The 6 Types of Working Genius from Patrick Lencioni, which is one tool we use for executive and organizational coaching.

While every work area is essential for any endeavor in the office, some will come more naturally to you and be more enjoyable. The six types of working genius are:

• Wonder: identifies the need for improvement or change
• Invention: generates new ideas or solutions
• Discernment: assesses the merit and workability of the idea
• Galvanizing: generates enthusiasm and action around the idea
• Enablement: initiates support and assists in the implementation of the idea
• Tenacity: commits to ensuring that the idea or solution gets completed and that desired results are achieved

For each of these working areas, you have a certain level of natural proficiency and extent to which these tasks give you energy or drain you, relative to others.

• Working Geniuses – The two areas in which you are most naturally gifted and from which you derive energy and joy.
• Working Competencies – The two areas in which you are capable and don’t mind doing for a limited time, as they neither give you energy nor drain you.
• Working Frustrations – The two areas that do not come as naturally to you, and tend to drain your energy and steal your joy.

If you spend all your time on working competencies, you’ll eventually grow bored and restless to apply your more energizing capacities.

If you spend a good deal of time on working frustrations, you’ll be highly dissatisfied and weary with your job.

Ultimately, you want to play to your working geniuses as much as possible, so that both your impact in the work, and your energy behind it, will be expansive.

Discerning What to Prioritize and What to Delegate

Knowledge is power, and when you know what areas light up for you, it’s instructive for guiding what roles and environments you choose, how you lead yourself, and how you develop and organize within teams.

There are many reasons why we don’t delegate, such as a fear of losing control or fear of losing quality. But, stop to consider the opportunity cost of spending a lot of time on working frustrations and working competencies—it’s more costly than you realize.

Martell suggests the DRIP matrix for evaluating how to re-organize your energy and time to prioritize the enjoyable work where your impact (or income) is increased.

• Delegate (D): Delegate what tends to drain you and has low-value impact. These are often administrative tasks which can effectively be handled by another.
• Replace (R): Some tasks are high-value impact but personally drain your energy. While you may have to do these to begin with, you’ll eventually want to find others, who are energized by these tasks, to support you. If you can overcome the hesitation to let go, replacing will serve your ability to hone your impact.
• Invest (I): For those areas which are low-value in immediate impact but still nurture and energize you—such as fun work tasks, time with family, or exercise—you will want to invest time. It will motivate you, help with burnout, and one day, it will pay off.
• Produce (P): When it comes to high-value tasks that energize you and that you also enjoy, this is your impact zone—which you protect by delegating and replacing other tasks. You want to expand the time you spend in this realm.

For every entrepreneur or leader, the DRIP process can be difficult and requires trust. But slowly and iteratively loosening your grip on the work you could be doing less of may be one of the most powerful professional decisions you make.

Crossing DRIP With Areas of Working Genius

Knowing your working geniuses (take the assessment here) can really inform how you apply the actions of the DRIP matrix approach at work.

Your working frustrations are where delegating (D) and replacing (R) may make all the difference. You’ll want to delegate chasing invoices (Tenacity) and perhaps you can seek out an ally to bring the entire department on board (Galvanizing) if these skills are working frustrations for you.

With freed up time, your working geniuses are going to be your high-value production (P) zone, where you focus on owning and expanding. So if your working geniuses are Wonder (sensing what’s missing or could be better) and Invention (generating new ideas), you’ll want to focus on and expand opportunities to explore new visions and evaluate big strategic ideas.

Working competencies may increasingly fall into the delegate territory, or replace territory, as you step higher in leadership. Just because you can do them well enough doesn’t mean you should still be doing these tasks in your current position.

The more you advance, the more it matters to invest (I) in what sustains you, as it will help build energy for your geniuses/production zone.

You’ll want to elevate the application of your working geniuses as you rise—if one is Enablement, can you focus on enablement in strategic partnerships while others manage some of the team-level enablement of individual members?

Beyond self-awareness, the key is also knowing other’s working genius areas in your teams. Believe it or not, someone actually enjoys and is energized doing the work that drains you. The most effective team dynamics play collaboratively on everyone’s complementary geniuses.

Leading With Your Time and Energy

As a leader, one of the marks that you’re on a path of growth is your willingness to divest your energies from where they no longer are as valuable or effective.

It’s another step to know what you’re truly gifted at as a leader and to put the weight of your leadership behind it. But it’s this very career move that may reward you the most, both professionally and personally.

By: Aimee Hansen is a writer, facilitator, and co-author of This Book Is a Retreat. She has contributed to The Glass Hammer for over a decade.