It's three point thirty in the afternoon and you have hit a wall. We've just had a long, very cerebral meeting and now you've got to back it up with some pretty intellectually demanding writing work. But you're exhausted. Now, before you reach for the can of red bull or that block of chocolate, you might want to have a listen to what Holly Ransom has to say about energy.
Holly is a full Bright scholar and the author of The Leading Edge, and she says that there's a different way to perk up when you're running low on energy. The red bulls, the half later cups of coffee, and the sugary snacks might feel like they're working, but they're really just numbing the signals your body is trying to send you. So how can we manage our energy levels naturally?
My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of Behave val Science Consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. On Today is my Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Holly Ransom about why and how she does an energy audit.
An energy audit for me is as simple as get a notebook and have a page where you just write some bullet points of things, being curious about your energy and what you observe. So I know, naturally I'm a really very much high energy in the morning. I absolutely hit a wall. In the kind of mid to late afternoon. I'm just a no go between about like three point thirty and five or three and five, like it's a
really dead zone for me. And then I have this incredible burst of energy and kind of the mid evening again as well. And so it's changed the way that I think about structuring my days because, for example, I try to make sure I never get up and get straight on email. And that was something I learned from, you know, Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You know that learning that difference between urgent and important and making sure that the urgent doesn't take the place
of the important. So when I get up and I've got energy to go, I want to be putting into things that are important. They're going to be stuff that are to do with my goals that are going to help me step towards things that really matter to me. They're things that I've got to put a lot of thought into. Maybe it's a proposal for a new idea. Maybe it's thinking through how I could structure up a
collaboration with someone I'm really excited about working with. But it's not going to be sitting through my emails, or it's not going to be choosing to audit my expenses or something like that. You know, They're going to be things I know I have to do them absolutely, but I'm going to try and do them at points in the day where I've got a natural kind of energy low or I'm not needing as much of kind of the energy I bring to bear on other topics or
need to bring to bear on other topics. I think the other thing I've noticed is, you know, and this is true of what we've learned for some time about attention spans and stuff like that, Like I do see that I'm at the end of ninety minutes often needing just a little bit of a perk up and a reboot. So that's where I've started inserting these micro brakes. Whether it is as simple as I'm going to do ten jump squads, like literally in the room I'm still in,
just to re energize and shake my body awake. Sometimes if it's been a particularly you know, intense like cerebral meeting, or I'm just feeling a little bit drained mentally, I'll sit there and I'll do ten deep breaths. You know, where one of those apple watches where it can do them for you, or it can guide you through them in terms of the ease of doing that. So just finding those little ways of intervening in those moments, because all of us have got things in the day that
do drainers. We can't avoid any of that. It's about how we strategize and put these things around that so that we can re energize ourselves and come out of those logs. And we don't need red bulls and you know, the three point thirty eightis snacks and things like that to do it, because ofterently, all we're doing there is is kind of numbing a sensation our body is trying to tell us and using kind of an artificial way of kind of pushing through it. So thinking about how
to actually start to be the energy for ourselves. It's just been a really profound way that I've shifted managing my day and week in the last six years, probably, and I couldn't be more happy with the results, and I couldn't be a bigger believer in this idea.
Now when I think of you, Holly, I'm like, it's hard to imagine you having these low energy periods because I feel like you're such a high energy, high achieving person. But what do you do to switch off or relax? Do you have rituals or practices around that?
Yeah, definitely, And it's something I have historically. Like I say, this is something that I've learned in my more recent history, so the last five or so years. It's definitely not something I was all that good add in my sort
of early twenties. So it's been a learned habit and something I've come to understand that if you don't look after yourself and you don't really properly recharge that productive downtime where you're actually allowing yourself to restore, you're very hard to do anything at any kind of intensity for any serious length of time. And I guess, as well as the stats on what we see about burnout probably suggest a lot of us are struggling with the same thing,
you know. For me switching off, I've become a lot better at it, and I think it's the great intervention
of my partner. We're really good about not letting work blur into the evenings and really safeguarding our weekends, and I think that's been really good, the discipline and the accountability we give each other in that it doesn't mean every now and again something urgently pops up, sure, but on the whole weekends of weekends, weekends of a quality time there for friends, there for being active, there for getting out and being part of whether a sport or
cultural events. We try and make sure that their time out so that when we start Monday again, we're really hitting the ground running with the energy that we need
for that week ahead. I think one of the other things we've been playing with this year that I've found really beneficial is phone free Friday nights, which sounds so silly, but that idea of the of switching off from a week, putting the phone down at five o'clock and not turning it on till Saturday morning, and just that absence of notification, that ability to properly switch off because the work week isn't continuing to linger into your Friday night and then
you know, spill over into the weekend. I've just really enjoyed that complete disconnect from tech. You know, it's only for what it would it be, I guess eighteen hours or something like that we really turn it off for. But that's been fantastic. So I encourage people to find little ways of putting tech breaks into because we've just found that to be really beneficial and you just realize how how connected you out of the thing the rest
of the time. So that ability to properly disconnect has been a great one.
That is it for today. Now, if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, which range from interesting research findings through the gadgets that I'm loving. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot cotwork
dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.