Tag Archive for: time management

Resource Like a Leader: Optimize Your Energy and Time

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Resource like a leader optimize your energy and timeAs 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. 

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The Capacity Equation: How High-Performing Women Sustain Energy and Clarity

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capacity equationModern leadership demands more than managing time and tasks. It requires being a master of personal capacity, and this is a matter of leading yourself first and foremost so that you can effectively and organically lead others, projects, or communities. For women in leadership, particularly in high-stakes industries like finance or law, the ability to protect and expand energy is a decisive leadership skill.

Female leaders are disproportionately at risk for burnout due to both visible and invisible labor (balancing intense workloads with emotional awareness, organizational care, familial responsibilities, and relationships). According to Deloitte’s survey Women @ Work: A Global Outlook, more than half of women in leadership roles report feeling burned out and for many, their stress levels are increasingly growing. The message is glaringly obvious that time management is no longer enough. Sustainable performance and success requires a new approach: energy intelligence.

Rethinking the Capacity Equation

Capacity can be thought of as the dynamic relationship between what fuels and what depletes. While time is finite and we cannot create more of it, capacity is expandable, but only with intention. When leaders continuously expend more than they replenish, they move into cognitive fatigue, emotional depletion, and eventually, diminished impact.

Neuroscience has long shown that chronic stress impairs access to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for focus, empathy, and decision-making. When leaders operate in constant overdrive, they are quite literally functioning with less of their brain available. In a chronically stressed-out state of being, loss of resilience and cognitive rigidity are symptoms that may arise in response to the mental overload. The cost isn’t just personal, it ripples into the culture of teams and organizations because it derails your capacity to show up as your best self.

The Myth of Infinite Output

In our societal constructs, the path to success has been built on proving worth and value through unrelenting output. Yet this model is not sustainable and no longer necessary. The most effective leaders today aren’t those who give endlessly, but those who replenish strategically.

High-performing women who learn to manage their capacity shift from running on adrenaline and overcommitting to leading from alignment. They understand that clarity, creativity, and calm are not luxuries; they’re the foundation for performance that lasts let alone their own fulfillment.

Three Shifts to Expand Capacity

1. Move from time management to energy stewardship.

Traditional productivity frameworks focus on optimizing hours and hacks. But energy is made up of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being, and it’s what determines the quality of those hours. As Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy argue in Harvard Business Review’s “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time”, sustained performance comes from rhythmic renewal, not relentless effort. Intentionality is critical when it comes to designing each day around energetic pulls (demands on your energy) and extends (where you choose to give your energy).

Energy stewardship starts with awareness. We can regularly ask: Which activities energize me? Which consistently drain me? The answers reveal where to realign work, connections, and personal times toward what fuels vitality and effectiveness. Over time, prioritizing high-energy activities, such as creative endeavors, mentoring, and strategic thinking, creates greater output with less depletion.

2. Replace routines with intentional rituals.

Routines are autopilot behaviors done to check a box; rituals are conscious choices done to refuel. When leaders infuse intention into daily transitions like beginning the day, entering meetings, or closing the laptop, they create micro-moments of renewal.

Small rituals, like three deep breaths before a presentation, brewing coffee or tea in the present moment without a phone in hand, or a five-minute gratitude practice at the end of the day, reset the nervous system and sharpen focus. Rather than look at intentional pauses as inefficiencies where we could be doing something else, we need to see them as self-leadership strategies and energetic hygiene. They enable leaders to meet the next challenge with more presence and grounding instead of reactivity.

3. Shift from proving to preserving.

The instinct to prove competence, reliability, or capability is deeply ingrained, especially among women who’ve navigated demanding environments. Cultivating influence is about preservation through protecting the clarity, energy, and perspective that empowers leaders to operate at their highest level.

Preserving energy is not a retreat from ambition; it’s how ambition endures through inner alignment. Leaders who set boundaries, delegate strategically, and integrate rest model sustainable success for their teams. They demonstrate that resilience isn’t built in exhaustion, rather it’s built in recovery.

The New Leadership Power

Sustainable leadership is not about doing less, slowing down, or being less ambitious. Instead it’s about leading differently, and redefining power as the ability to remain centered, clear, and effective under pressure. When women leaders learn to manage their capacity, they not only elevate their own performance but also set a new cultural standard that well-being and excellence are not competing values.

The next era of leadership will not be defined by who can push the hardest, but by who can sustain the longest. Energy stewardship is not a personal wellness tactic, it’s a professional strategy and alignment is the future of leadership.

By: Erin Coupe is the author of I Can Fit That In and host of the podcast with the same name.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

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How Habit Stacking Can Help Busy Executive Women Supercharge Their Success

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habit stackingThere are many challenges to being a successful executive and managing your personal and professional responsibilities. With so much to focus on, trying to introduce a new habit into your routine can seem daunting.

Habit stacking is a life saver for executive women who want to improve their personal or professional lives without sacrificing the quality of what they currently achieve on a daily basis. It’s a low-stress way to supercharge their success without taking time away from other tasks.

What is Habit Stacking?

Everyone has habits, whether you realize you have them or not. Choosing to pour cereal before your milk, what you reach for first in the morning and how you travel to work are all habits.

Some habits are neutral and don’t impact your quality of life. Others, however, could contribute to your stress, fatigue and well-being.

Research shows that only half of people keep their New Year’s resolutions, showing how bad humans are at creating positive habits. Habit stacking is a way to hack that.

Habit stacking connects your desire to improve your organization habits, heath or leadership skills to a pattern you previously established. You get used to performing the task while doing the one you’re used to, and you form a new habit. You can create positive habits by consistently doing them simultaneously and in the same setting.

By connecting a new habit to an old one, your brain combines the two and the new behavior gets ingrained. Author S.J. Scott popularized “habit-stacking” in the professionally-backed book Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less. Since then, it’s become a tool for people to accomplish their goals.

Here are five ways habit stacking can help busy executives.

1. It Increases Focus

When you habit stack, you can improve your ability to focus on essential tasks. It can be hard to complete the steps in your routine without your mind wandering to other things you must do. Habit stacking is a great way to incorporate mindfulness and meditation into your life, helping you focus on the present moment.

Introducing a new habit into your life can seem daunting. Since habit stacking connects the new task to another routine, it is easier to add to your life. Instead of stressing about not doing it, you can focus on how well you’re doing with the new habit and what you can improve. For example, if you want to start bullet journaling, you can do so while you wait for your morning coffee to brew.

2. You Can Better Commit to Your Goals

Habit stacking makes it much easier to commit to what you desire. Sliding things into your other habits instead of creating a separate one makes achieving your goals easier.

If you want to stay hydrated but forget to drink water, habit stacking can help. Stack drinking a glass of water as you check your email. Doing so will help you meet your hydration goals without interfering with other parts of your day.

3. It Helps You Stay Organized

As an executive, you know the organization is a must. However, staying consistently organized is easier said than done. Habit stacking can be an excellent tool for managing your office and being punctual for important meetings and events.

With habit stacking, you can condition your brain to put things where they need to go and adequately prepare for your activities. Putting your pens back in their drawer is easier when you stack it by shutting down your computer for the evening. You can put your files away when you walk out of your office for the evening. Stack the things you often forget with the things you don’t for success.

4. You Can Effectively Prioritize

If you want to change your priorities but get stuck in a negative routine, habit-stacking can help. Connect one of the positive habits to your negative ones. If you bite your nails to handle stress, you can stack it to get up and take a walk. Eventually, the nail biting habit could turn into taking a walk instead.

As an executive, it can be hard to juggle important tasks, but by stacking the most important ones with your routine, you can complete them with haste.

5. It Promotes Healthier Coping Mechanisms

Life gets stressful, especially with the responsibilities of managing a company. Stacking your habits can help you introduce positive coping mechanisms to reduce stress. For example, you could listen to a chapter of your favorite audiobook while prepping your lunch.

Self-care is a vital tool for everyone, especially when you have the responsibilities of being an executive. The industry still has inappropriate biases, making you work harder for success. Incorporating habits that aid your body and mind can help you feel less stress, reduce symptoms of mental illness and allow you to live a more peaceful life.

Using Habit Stacking to Supercharge Your Success

Habit stacking effectively adds healthy habits into your life that support your personal and professional growth. Connecting a current pattern with one you want to implement can start you on the path to success.

By: Beth Rush is the career and finance editor at Body+Mind. She has 5+ years of experience writing about the power of human design to reveal entrepreneurial potential and time management strategies. She also writes about using the emotion of awe to activate our leadership prowess. You can find her on Twitter @bodymindmag. Subscribe to Body+Mind for more posts by Beth Rush.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).

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