The power of full engagement
A personal energy training program outlines strategies on how to prevent burnout and improve productivity, discussing how to work with four key sources of energy, balancing stress and recovery, and implementing positive routines.
Stats for nerds
24recommend
33mentions
31people
2009–2026years
76% recommend24% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The metaphor that changed my perspective came from the book, "The Power of Full Engagement", paraphrasing "you're behaving as if you're a world-class endurance athlete without an off season - stop it."
- Have you stumbled on The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr[1][2]? It crystallises this idea well, divides energy into several different dimensions and tries to give you a framework to figure out which dimension is constraining you and how to expand your reservoir. Some of the practical advice is silly but I still find it very helpful. I go back to it often.
[1] https://hbr.org/2007/10/manage-your-energy-not-your-time [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_...
- I recommend "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal" by Loehr and Schwartz.
- This reminds me of a book I've read a couple of times now, The Power of Full Engagement. Their very similar concept is that the limiting factor in most of our lives isn't really time, but energy. As described in the OP, most of us have experience evenings that felt wasted because we're too tired from work to do anything valuable, but trying to cram value into every moment of life also feels exhausting. The basic take of the book is that every area of our life needs periods of exertion and periods of rest, much like the body does in order to build muscle. The same is true of the mind and the emotional self. So for each of these realms, you ideally want to be either fully engaged, or fully at rest, not somewhere in-between. Then it gives various techniques to achieve this. One I liked in particular is to take opportunities that might otherwise be frustrating - stuck in traffic, in line at the bank, whatever - and see them as instead a time for mental rest.
Anyway, might be a good read. FWIW I'm a big fan of GTD as well. Used properly I think a system like that can be a good complement to this philosophy. When it's time to work, you grab a task from your list and get right to it. And when it's not time to work, you can free your brain of any related distractions, confident that everything you need to remember will be in your GTD system when you need it again. (Likewise if you have a stray idea that you want to remember, instead of holding it in your brain, it can go in there.) Helps keep work (and by that I mean any jobs that need to be done, not just the 9-5) from dominating your thoughts all the time.
- I probably shouldn't be surprised to hear that because my experiences are similar and I understand that this is the case for most people.
My advice would be to work on projects that you are intrinsically motivated to work on. Don't work on a project in expectation of any reward if you complete it. Let yourself know that it's ok if you don't achieve all (or any) of what you might have set out to achieve in the first place. Myself, the side projects where I've achieved the most have been ones that give me a dopamine hit (basically games or things that are graphical, in my case, even though I've rarely been paid to work on those sorts of things in my career as a software engineer).
If you're interested in reading up on motivation then there are few books that I've found really useful:
- Drive by Daniel Pink talks about the different types of motivation (intrinsic vs extrinsic) and talks about the motivating factors of autonomy, mastery and purpose. There's a nice sketchnote video based on a talk by the author that did the rounds a few years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgGhSOAtAyQ that sums up the key points.
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg talks about habits, how they form and how you can understand and hack them.
- The Power Of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz talks about managing different aspects of your life in order to have energy to do the things that are important to you.
Hopefully the above may be of some use to you. They have been very useful for me, particularly in understanding how counterintuitive human psychology is in some cases and in terms of understanding how some strategies that you may be tempted to use can be counterproductive.
- Personal Development : Power of Full Engagement
