Managing Energy, Not Just Time

I had a perfectly optimized schedule. Every hour accounted for. Tasks prioritized. Calendar color-coded. And I was still exhausted by 3pm, watching my productivity crater while I scrolled through YouTube Shorts during time I'd mentally labeled "available."

The problem wasn't my schedule. The problem was me.

The Density Problem

Here's what I discovered after about a year of trying to squeeze more productive hours out of each day: productivity isn't linear. You can't just add more "work time" and get proportionally more work done. What actually happens is your productivity per hour starts dropping. You're spending more time but getting diminishing returns.

I call this the density problem. Low-density work looks like productivity on a calendar. It fills the blocks. But when you look at what actually got accomplished, it doesn't add up.

I was staying up late, working into the evening, waking up at 7:30 or 7:45, pounding an energy drink, scrolling LinkedIn for a few minutes, then launching straight into the day. By mid-afternoon I was running on fumes. And because I have three kids, once they were finally down for the night, I needed time for myself before I could even think about sleep. That pushed bedtime to 11pm or later. Everything was back-to-back-to-back with no recovery time built in.

The schedule looked full. The output was thin.

The Nicotine Crutch

Here's the thing I didn't fully understand at the time: nicotine was central to how I managed energy and focus throughout the day. I'd quit smoking a couple years prior and switched to vaping. And vaping wasn't just a habit. It was infrastructure.

There's the chemical effect, sure. But also the ritual: the hand-to-mouth motion, changing batteries, refilling the reservoir. All of it structured my attention. It gave me these micro-breaks throughout the day that kept me going.

When I quit vaping last October or November, it left a gap. A real one. My whole energy management system had a dependency I hadn't fully accounted for. For a while I compensated with caffeine. At my peak, I was drinking around 500 milligrams a day. That's insane. And it wasn't sustainable.

So I had the density problem, the schedule problem, and now I'd removed one of the main tools I'd been using to push through it all. Everything was about to catch up with me.

What Low Energy Actually Costs

The obvious cost is lower output. Less gets done. But there's a subtler cost that took me longer to recognize.

I've spent years working on my communication style. By nature, I'm direct. Blunt, even. The kind of direct that people sometimes read as rude. Part of growing as a leader has been learning to soften how I say things, to meet people where they are, to recognize that how you say something matters as much as what you say.

When I was running on empty, that's where things slipped. Not the technical work. The interpersonal stuff. The skills I'd deliberately cultivated started regressing.

A colleague sat me down at a Chili's earlier this year. He asked if everything was okay. Someone had mentioned to him that I'd been pretty abrupt in a meeting. My first reaction was defensive. I had a justification ready: the person wasn't answering my questions directly, I was frustrated, I was just doing my job by digging into details.

Then he said he'd noticed it too. That the progress I'd made on communication had been sliding backward.

I didn't fully hear it in the moment. I was too busy defending myself. But it stuck with me. And once someone points something out, you start noticing it everywhere.

That's what low energy cost me. Not just hours of mediocre work, but months of relationship capital I'd built up through intentional effort.

The Counterintuitive Fix

I've always been a night owl. Staying up late felt natural. Exercise felt like punishment. I used to joke that the only time you'd see me run is if someone was chasing me. Or that I did one sit-up a day: half when I woke up, half when I went to bed.

So what changed? I started waking up at 5:15am to exercise.

I know. It sounds like the opposite of managing energy. But here's what actually happens: I work out for about an hour with a friend who comes over. By 6:30 or 6:45, I'm done, and I still have time before my old wake-up time. Time to actually relax a bit. Scroll if I want to. Ease into the day instead of launching straight into it.

The exercise generates dopamine. It stimulates my appetite so I'm eating more. It gets my body and mind actually awake instead of just technically conscious.

And I restructured the evening too. Instead of starting the kids' bedtime routine at 9pm and finally getting my own wind-down time at 11, I start at 8. I'm in bed by 9:30 or 10. I still get that 30-45 minutes of personal time at the end of the day, because I know I need it. But now it doesn't steal from my sleep.

By 3pm now, I'm still feeling good. That wasn't true before.

The exercise, the sleep schedule, the restructured routines: all of that has helped fill the gap that nicotine left. It's not a perfect replacement. The first few months were rough. But I'm in a better place now than I was when I was vaping, because the foundation is actually solid instead of chemically propped up.

The Accountability Factor

The exercise routine only works because I have someone showing up at my door at 5:15am. We started training together for a mountain hike earlier this year, a 13,000-footer, which is no joke. We'd already become friends through a Bible study group, and he'd been looking for a workout partner for accountability.

He found a home gym setup on Facebook Marketplace for about $100, a pneumatic resistance machine that normally costs over a grand. We got it set up at my place, and what started as him teaching me the exercises turned into a consistent routine. About two and a half months now without missing much.

How do I deal with mornings when I don't feel like doing it? I keep my mouth shut and let him show up. Then we do it anyway. That's the whole point of accountability. The decision was already made.

The Home Front

My kids didn't love the earlier bedtime push. That's still a work in progress. The girls are 9 and 10, and on Friday or Saturday nights especially, it's hard to enforce. Sometimes I just get my 5-year-old down and tell the girls not to stay up all night, and we call it good enough.

But my extended family and friends have noticed positive changes. The kids have noticed too. I was always kind of a string bean, and now I actually weigh the most I've ever weighed. I'm getting more fit. They like seeing that.

Being a single dad means there's no other adult to push back on the routine changes. That makes some things easier. But it also means there's no backup when the schedule gets disrupted. Every adjustment has ripple effects.

Time Management Is Necessary But Not Sufficient

None of this means time management doesn't matter. It absolutely does. You can still procrastinate, waste time, schedule the wrong things, spend hours on low-priority work. Getting that right matters.

But time management assumes you have consistent energy to deploy. That assumption is wrong. Energy fluctuates. Focus fluctuates. If you're not accounting for that, you're scheduling a person who doesn't exist.

Managing energy means prioritizing rest. It means building in recovery time instead of treating it as waste. It means recognizing that some hours are worth more than others, and structuring your day so the high-value hours get high-value work.

For me, that meant flipping my entire schedule upside down. Night owl to early riser. Sedentary to active. Caffeine-dependent to sleep-dependent. It felt counterintuitive at every step.

But the 3pm crash is gone. The communication regression is reversing. The work is denser.

The schedule finally matches the reality of how I actually function. That's the whole point.