Chapter 11  The Energy Metric

We humans want many things: good health, financial freedom, accomplishment, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career, and more. The problem with all this wanting is that the time you spend chasing one of those desires is time you can't spend chasing any of the others. So how do you organize your limited supply of time to get the best result?

The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all the other priorities.

Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and taking all other obvious steps. It also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better, too.

You might be familiar with a television show that was called 'The Dog Whisperer'. On the show, Cesar Millan, a dog training expert, helped people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar's main trick involves training the humans to control their own emotional states because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from the owners. When the owners learn to control themselves, the dogs calm down, too. I think this same method applies to humans interacting with other humans. You've seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I'm suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love life, your family life, and your career.

When I talk about increasing your personal energy, I don't mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type of energy. I'm talking about a calm, focused energy. To others, it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.

Before I became a cartoonist, I worked in a number of awful corporate jobs. But I still enjoyed going to work partly because I exercised most evenings and usually woke up feeling good—and partly because I always had one or two side projects going on that had the potential to set me free. Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas I tried out during my corporate days. For years, the prospect of starting "my own thing" and leaving my cubicle behind gave me an enormous amount of energy.

This book is another example of something that gets my energy up. I like to think that someone might read this collection of ideas and find a few thoughts that help. That possibility is tremendously motivating for me. So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I'm with them. I'm happier and more satisfied with my life. The energy metric helps make my choices easier.

Energy is a simple word that captures a mind-boggling array of complicated happenings. For our purposes, I'll define your personal energy as anything that gives you a positive lift, either mentally or physically. Like art, you know it when you see it. Examples will help.

For me, shopping is an energy killer. The moment I walk into a busy store, I feel the energy drain from my body. The exhaustion starts as a mental thing, but within minutes I feel as if my body has been through a marathon. Shopping is simply exhausting for me.

Your situation might be different. For some people, shopping is a high. It boosts energy. So using my example, a person like me should seek to minimize shopping (and I do) while a person who gets a buzz from it should indulge, so long as it doesn't take too much away from other priorities in life.

Managing your personal energy is like managing budgets in a company. In business, every financial decision in one department is connected to others. If the research and development group cuts spending today, eventually that will ripple through the organization and reduce profits in some future year. Similarly, when you manage your personal energy, it's not enough to maximize it in the short run or in one defined area. Ideally, you want to manage your personal energy for the long term and the big picture. Having one more cocktail at midnight might be an energy boost at the time, but you pay for it double the next day.

At this point in the book, allow me pause to acknowledge your entirely appropriate skepticism about my notion that organizing your life around the concept of personal energy is useful. I applaud your healthy skepticism. But I'll ask you to hold off on judging the usefulness of personal energy as an organizing principle until you see how it's woven into the following chapters.

By analogy, imagine explaining the idea of capitalism to someone who had never heard of it. You'd be greeted with severe skepticism and legitimate questions:

Wouldn't it cause you to cut expenses now and underinvest?

Wouldn't it cause you to become sort of a jerk to your employees?

Wouldn't it cause you to cheat your customers whenever you can?

The honest answer to all those concerns is yes, they are entirely valid. Capitalism is rotten at every level, and yet it sums up to something extraordinarily useful for society over time. The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad. Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system for a short while.

You have the same paradox with personal energy. If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness. Why are you going skiing when you should be working at the homeless shelter, you selfish bastard?!

My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will sum up to something incredible that is more good than bad.

As I write this paragraph, my family and a few good friends are wondering why I'm selfishly lagging behind and not meeting them for an afternoon of sitting in the sun. I'll get there soon. And when I do, I'll feel energized, satisfied, and far more fun to be around. No one will think worse of me in the long run for being thirty minutes behind for a full day of fun that they have already started. But everyone will appreciate that I'm in a better mood when I show up. That's the tradeoff. Like capitalism, some forms of selfishness are enlightened.

Matching Mental State to Activity

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task. For example, when I first wake up, my brain is relaxed and creative. The thought of writing a comic is fun, and it's relatively easy because my brain is in exactly the right mode for that task. I know from experience that trying to be creative in the midafternoon is a waste of time. By 2:00 PM, all I can do is regurgitate the ideas I've seen elsewhere. At 6:00 AM, I'm a creator, and by 2:00 PM I'm a copier.

Everyone is different, but you'll discover that most writers work either early in the morning or past midnight. That's when the creative writing juices flow most easily.

When lunchtime rolls around, I like to grab a quick snack and go to the gym or play tennis. At that time of day, I have plenty of energy, so exercise seems like a good idea. I know that if I wait until after dinner I won't have the sort of physical energy I need to talk myself into exercising. In my twenties, I could exercise at midnight with no problem, so keep in mind that you might want to make adjustments to your daily patterns over time.