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

by Carey Nieuwhof

Many people are overwhelmed, overcommitted, and overworked doing exactly what they thought they wanted to do with their lives.

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

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.

Days off, vacations, and even sabbaticals aren’t a complete solution for an unsustainable pace. A sustainable pace is the solution for an unsustainable pace.

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. Because you are so much more productive at work and have healthier boundaries, you’ll free up far more time for this joy.

Stop saying you don’t have the time. Start admitting you didn’t make the time.

The key to living passionately is to focus your time on what is truly most important to you and to choose to do those things wholeheartedly, with enthusiasm. Stress makes you skim. Weariness wears you out, and when you have nothing left to give, it’s too easy to coast.

Time doesn’t grow. It won’t expand, which is why time management brings you diminishing returns.

When the Stress Spiral sucks you in and you squeeze your most important work into the leftover space of your life, you cheat your gift. 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.

Notice that, for the most part, these important priorities aren’t urgent. I could skip almost all of them, and few people would complain. But these are the things that give my life and leadership meaning, purpose, and sustainability.

Without a strategy for saying no, you default to yes, and your life vaporizes with other people’s priorities being realized rather than yours.

None of us can do it all. Remind yourself that you can’t prioritize the people who matter most to you if you say yes to everyone else.

When you’re tempted to cave, remind yourself that because time is a limited commodity, saying yes to something good now will lead you to say no to something great later.

The quality of your work is determined by the quality of your thinking. And high-quality thinking is incompatible with constant output.

Distancing yourself from people or erecting hard barriers will diminish the quality of your life, not enrich it. It might be effective for getting people out of your personal space, but dehumanizing people and distancing yourself from them is hardly the recipe for a quality life.

The people who want your time are rarely the people who should have your time. And the people who should get most of your premium time rarely ask you for it.

So many leaders have nothing left to give because they’ve given it all away to people who, honestly, weren’t helped by the interaction.

We spend a lot of time worrying about people and things we have no true influence over, and when you eliminate that worry from your life, the mental clarity and space you acquire is really quite astonishing.

The struggle, then, is between design and desire. You were designed to handle between three and 150 in a meaningful way, but being a social creature and not wanting to upset, anger, or disappoint people, your desire is to connect with far more.

Digital messages are always sent at the convenience of the sender, never at the convenience of the recipient. Digital proximity means anyone has access anytime, anywhere, which feels so overwhelming, especially when you’re watching the sunset with the people you love most. Physical proximity has good manners that digital proximity hasn’t learned.

Deep down, most of us are people pleasers. I am. The challenge with people-pleasing, of course, is that you end up pleasing all the wrong people and ignoring the right ones.

Blank space on your calendar is a trap. It looks like freedom, but it’s really jail disguised as liberty. The moment you think the white space on your calendar gives you freedom, disappointment is right around the corner.

In this culture, you almost have to be stressed. For an ambitious person, it’s rather unthinkable not to be stressed. When you start to live the Thrive Cycle and you find yourself loving your Green Zone, you might think there’s something wrong because you’re having too much fun and getting far too many things done.

Stress is a good bad word. Our culture hates stress yet thrives on it. As a result, the pullback toward stress is almost gravitational. Stress is a badge of honor in the hamster-wheel life everybody’s living.