At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor

by Carey Nieuwhof

Here’s the truth: you deserve to stop living at an unsustainable pace. What if—instead—you learned how to live at your best, personally and professionally?

If you don’t declare a finish line to your work, your body will.

Our inability to control our use of technology is making us sicker, more anxious, and more distraught than ever before.

As I studied top performers, I realized they moved way past time management and were highly focused on managing not just their time but their energy. Usually they had one thing in common: they did what they were best at when they were at their best.

Constant stress denies so many people permission to dream or to accomplish what they’re called to do.

If your busy season has no ending, it’s not a season—it’s your life.

Everybody gets three primary assets every day: time, energy, and priorities.

Time off won’t heal you when the problem is how you spend your time on.

Unleveraged energy springs from failing to cooperate with your personal energy levels as they rise and fall over the course of the day. Not leveraging your energy means you squander your most productive hours, not because you intend to but because you don’t know when they happen or how to schedule your life around them.

Hijacked priorities happen when you allow other people to determine what you get done.

At the heart of this is your calendar. To make everything work together seamlessly, you’ll start approaching your calendar in a very different way. Adding the discipline of calendaring your energy zones, priorities, and key relationships will move everything you’ve learned from intention to reality.

“Live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow.”

Intimacy, after all, is shared experience, and creating a regular rhythm of shared experiences with a handful of close friends and family members will help you thrive.

Margin has less to do with income than it does with healthy habits.

The reason other people don’t value your time is because you don’t.

But the reality I kept bumping up against was the same problem you face: the opportunities available to a capable person always exceed the time available.

Eliminate the excuses, and you start to move forward, because you can make excuses or you can make progress, but you can’t make both.

Most people who accomplish significant things aren’t balanced people; they’re passionate people. Balanced people do “off” well, but being “off” isn’t of much use if you have things you want to do that require you to be “on.”

What you do is leverage your energy (or lack of it). Don’t fight the patterns; fuel them.

Your gifting is your sweet spot—what you uniquely do best.1 Those are the things that others find difficult but you make look easy, the things for which you have natural aptitude.

The key to finding your passion is to look for things that give you energy. In other words, there are a handful of things you do that you find not only enjoyable but also energizing.

Impact refers to those things that, when done, will make the biggest difference, sometimes in the moment but often long term.

What am I trying to accomplish with my life, my family, my faith?

What can I do today/in this season that will have a significantly positive impact?3 What few things (or one thing), when done well, will help me move the cause forward? What activities, when I repeatedly do them, help me make meaningful progress? (This is a key question because your ongoing patterns and disciplines often make the biggest impact on your work and life.)

Spending thirty minutes of your Green Zone each day reading, studying, and honing your skills can make an astonishing difference. Like compound interest, the real benefits of small investments in your skill set show up years down the road.

You cheat your gift when you use it but never take the time to develop it. And when you do that, you cheat the world out of your best too.

The biggest Red Zone mistake you can make is to leave important decisions or critical tasks for this zone.

Express desires, not demands.

Ask questions instead of making statements.

Make sure you’ve done everything you can do.

Being around is no guarantee that anything relationally significant will happen, but not being around is an absolute guarantee that nothing relationally significant will happen.

You can get time and energy working in your favor, but unless you get priorities working in your favor, too, all you have is a fun new rhythm and a nifty theory that remains theoretical.

The wrong things will always want your attention. It’s your job to focus on the right things.

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

Technology makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

Our devices are one thing, but if you’re like me, you don’t even really need an enemy to interrupt you. You have one. It’s a perpetually distracted you. I can interrupt myself and get off track all by myself.

Every time you give your attention to something or someone, it costs you.

However—and this is the point—much of your attention and mine gets captured by things that really don’t matter. Paying attention to the wrong things costs you.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. —C. S. Lewis

There are two categories of people you should be investing less time in (and almost no Green Zone time in). One is the people you feel you should meet with because, well, things aren’t going well or they’re in a crisis you feel needs your attention. The other is the people who want to meet with you but don’t need to.

Despite your investment of time and energy, it never really gets better and there’s always something new you need to address or respond to. Some people don’t want to get better. They just want your time. Clinical psychologist John Townsend said people like this have “a flat learning curve.”

I’ve found more than a few times that the best thing I can do when I hit a flat-learning-curve dynamic in relationships is refer them to other people.

If you spend most of your time with draining people, you’ll live much of your life feeling drained.

You can give only what you’ve got. And if you’ve got nothing left in the tank, you can’t help anybody.

Relationally speaking, the Pareto principle looks like this: spend most of your time with the people who produce most of your results and the least amount of time with the people who don’t.

Starting at the center circle, Dunbar suggested that you and I are hardwired for three to five true friendships—intimate relationships with people whom you have the habit of connecting with at least once a week.

The next circle is the twelve to fifteen people he calls your “sympathy group”—friends you connect with at least once a month who share your values, interests, and often perspectives on life.

The deepest relationships rightly belong with the closest connections. I’m not arguing that there isn’t something to love in everyone. There is. You simply can’t be close enough to most people to have an authentic, deep, mutual relationship with them.

The depth of your response should be gauged by the depth of the relationship.

A fixed calendar is a predecision about how to spend your work and personal time, most often in repeating appointments with yourself, week after week, year after year.