The Other Side of Energy Management: Stop the Drains

You’ve probably had days where you start off feeling fully charged, only to find yourself on low power by mid-afternoon. Sometimes, it’s hard to explain why. You got a good night’s sleep, ate the protein, took five-minute breaks every hour, and used all the energy management techniques you’re supposed to use to make your energy last all day. Why isn’t it enough?

Your energy level has its pluses and minuses. While you might be doing everything right to start with a full charge, if you’re burning through it with a series of physically, cognitively, and emotionally taxing activities, it won’t last. If you want to get to the end of the day with energy to spare, you need to identify and address the things that are running you down.

Let’s break down the hidden energy hogs that are zapping your charge—and what you can do to conserve power.

Track Your Energy Balance

Ok, the battery metaphor is convenient, but humans aren’t as predictable as cell phones. Your unique job, personality, and circumstances mean that activities affect you differently than others. What burns you out might energize me. Your phone has a nifty screen to show the power consumption of different apps, but sadly, when it comes to the activities that are wearing you out, you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.

For two weeks, track your energy levels and note any highs and lows. What’s energizing you? What’s draining you? Which meetings, tasks, or people leave you depleted, and which ones give you a jolt? Once you’ve got the data, you can start making informed choices about where you invest your time and energy.

Common Energy Drains

To get you started, here are three common culprits and some strategies to slow the discharge.

Decision Fatigue

Making decisions is tiring. The scientists are still trying to figure out exactly why, but that doesn’t matter for our purposes. Each choice you make demands your attention, requires cognitive resources, and often triggers an emotional reaction as you try to balance risk and reward in the face of ambiguous information and uncertain outcomes. How many times a day are you doing that?

Anything you can do to reduce the number of decisions and streamline the ones that are left is a good investment.

Energy-saving tactics:Streamline low-stakes choices. Standardize meals, outfits, or workflows. Automate, mechanize, and form habits for as many things as possible.Batch decisions. Make similar choices in one go rather than context-switching. Do a bunch of similar administrative tasks at once. Fill in multiple performance review forms together.Use checklists. Get the process out of your head and into a reliable system. Each time you use it, improve it based on your results until you have a process that works like clockwork.Pre-program hard choices. Make difficult decisions and lock in the plan when you’re feeling at your highest energy. Rather than failing in a moment of weakness, make calls in your moments of strength.Drama

Emotional intensity consumes power quickly. Highs and lows, spins and dips on the emotional rollercoaster are exhausting. Whether it’s a teammate’s repeated venting, an emotionally loaded news story, or your own ruminating thoughts after a tense interaction, every hijack pulls your focus and lowers your capacity for productive work.

Drama-reducing Tactics:Limit exposure. Mute that chat thread. Skip the doomscroll. Excuse yourself from the gossip session. Step away from the sources of emotional extremes so you can stay focused on what needs to get done.Time-box it. Some people love drama and want nothing more than to rope you in. When you choose to engage in emotionally charged conversations, limit the time they take. Commiserate and console a colleague for 15 minutes before a meeting so you have a hard stop.Set boundaries. Let people know what conversations you’re available for—and which ones you’re not. You might be okay with a colleague periodically venting (sharing their own woes), but not gossiping (talking about someone who isn’t present).Install circuit breakers. When someone repeats the same complaint for the third time, it’s OK to say, “I’ve shared what I can. Let’s shift gears.”

The goal isn’t to disconnect completely or to become a cold, uncaring colleague. Instead, you’re trying to control when and how you plug into emotional currents.

Destructive Self-Talk

You might blame your exhaustion on external factors, but some of the worst energy drains are internal.

Self-doubt. Perfectionism. Conflict avoidance. Fear of being shut out. These narratives can often run in the background, pulling steady power and making it harder for you to use your energy to make real progress.

“I’m not good enough.”“This needs to be flawless.”“I can’t say that—it might upset someone.”

These mental scripts are draining.

Self-doubt-reducing Tactics:Notice the pattern. Give your inner critic a name so you can create some distance from the fiction it’s feeding you. “There’s Doubting Denise again. She’s up to her old tricks.”Interrupt the loop. Use a mantra, breathwork, or movement to break the cycle. Music can also quickly rewire your mood. I have a playlist of songs that are 100% effective in pulling me out of a funk.Replace the story. Practice more constructive, compassionate self-talk. And when all else fails, research shows that helping someone else reframe their negative self-talk will have a positive effect on your own.Keep Your Charge for What Matters

It’s too much to expect your energy to last the day if you’re only paying attention to one half of the equation. Energy management is more than just charging your batteries; you also have to reduce the drains.

When you reduce the amount of energy that’s going to low-value thoughts and activities and cope with decision fatigue, drama, and destructive self-talk, you’ll find yourself powering through your priorities with more ease, more presence, and more left for the people and passions that matter most.

Additional Resources

Drama Detox: How to Reduce Emotionality on Your Team

How to Boost Your Energy Levels

Leaders Do Not Understand Prioritization

 

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