The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

by Jim Loehr

physiologist Martin Moore-Ede, the president of Circadian Technologies and the author of The Twenty-Four-Hour Society, puts it: At the heart of the problem is a fundamental conflict between the demands of our man-made civilization and the very design of the human brain and body…. Our bodies were designed to hunt by day, sleep at night and never travel more than a few dozen miles from sunrise to sunset. Now we work and play at all hours, whisk off by jet to the far side of the globe, make life-or-death decisions or place orders on foreign stock exchanges in the wee hours of the morning. The pace of technological innovation is outstripping the ability of the human race to understand the consequences. We are machine-centered in our thinking—focused on the optimization of technology and equipment—rather than human-centered—focused on the optimization of human alertness and performance.