Learning This Decision-Making Principle Will Inoculate You Against Burnout

Make decisions based on energy, not time.

Our way of life is harming us. We’re not happy, as a people, are we? Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by life shouldn’t be normalized. Busyness shouldn’t be worshiped (though it’s easy to see why it is in our culture: business/busyness). The answer isn’t to figure out how to be more efficient and productive so we can fit it all in (where does it end?!). There’s no getting around it, the answer really is to do less. But how do we do less without feeling like we’re falling behind? How can we begin to change our lives so that we don’t burn out, we feel happier and more relaxed, and space opens up for us to pursue our true desires?

Let me start with a question. Do you make decisions about energy based on time, or decisions about time based on energy?

If you’re like most people in a Western(ized), postindustrial culture, it’s the former. You make calculations for what you can get done around how much time it takes to do it and time availability in your day. It’s a pretty simple equation: you expend energy based on time. Another way to put this is that you prioritize time usage over energy reserves (with the assumption that you’ll find that energy somewhere). This decision-making methodology will inevitably lead to exhaustion or even burnout for most of us.

But it seems like the obvious and correct way to do things, right? For example, you need to mow the lawn. Do you have a spare hour on Saturday afternoon? Yes? You schedule it in, and then you do it without thinking much about the energy side of things: you mow the lawn regardless of whether you feel like doing it. It seems natural to do things this way. When you have a long to-do list of things you (feel you) absolutely have to get done, there really is no other way to guarantee you do it. You have to find or make the time, schedule it in, and get to work.

It’s not wrong to do things this way. But it does lead to a particular experience of the relationship between time and energy that can be unpleasant. Feeling overloaded, overwhelmed, and exhausted are the extreme effects, but often the unpleasantness manifests in more subtle ways. Feeling chronic dissatisfaction, unfulfillment, tiredness, boredom, malaise. All those existential problems we associate with modern living. But this is not an inevitable consequence of modernity. It has to do with how we manage that relationship between our energy and time.

What if you decided to switch that relationship? Make decisions about how to use time based on energy? How would you do that, what would it look like?

It would look like living life in a way that appears, on the surface, to include two states of being we have an absolute abhorrence for in modern Western culture: being lazy and wasting time. It’s important to understand that terms like these are judgements, not realities. They belong to a paradigm, or worldview, that influence how we conceptualize work vs. inactivity. Here is the trade-off life gives us within this paradigm: either we run ourselves into the ground (feeling overwhelmed is normal! Everyone feels that way, it’s just part of life), or we let things slide, give in to our baser natures that want to waste hours, not just minutes but hours!, scrolling through Instagram while Netflix plays some inanity in the background. Neither of those choices are any good, in my opinion.

Here’s a different paradigm: feeling satisfied regardless of how much you get done, ending each day calm and happy, and not worrying at all about whether any given activity, including Instagram scrolling, is lazy or wasting time. How about not feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and inadequate to the tasks of our lives? How about not taking account of every minute spent, living in a constant fog of time-is-getting-away-from-me anxiety? It can take a long time to change your life in this way, but where you start is by making decisions about time based on energy.

This is what it looks like. There are all these things you think you need to do…dig deep and examine that. What’s going to happen if you don’t do them? Is someone going to come and arrest you? Probably not? The things we think we need to do are tangled up in all kinds of largely subconscious beliefs about our identity, what other people think, perfectionism, you name it. The next time you have something scheduled in on that Saturday afternoon, ask yourself if you feel up to it. Do you have the physical, mental, and emotional energy to tackle it? In other words, will it either energize you to do this task, or at least not deplete you? Yes? Do it. No? Use that time to do something you do have the energy for, even if it’s scrolling through Instagram. Because if that’s what you feel compelled to do, it’s because your brain needs a break from strenuous focused tasks. If you feel like taking a nap, that’s your physical body telling you it needs a break. Feel like reading? Your emotions need some quiet time.

Wait a minute, surely I’m not suggesting you do stuff based on whether or not you feel like it? Yeah, I am. Not all the things—obviously living your life entirely like this isn’t feasible for most. But you can start small and then gradually make changes in your life as you gain confidence that everything isn’t going to fall apart if you do things this way. You will learn to trust yourself that you will get done the stuff you absolutely have to, and you’ll feel better doing it because you’ll have greater energy reserves. You may even start enjoying that must-do stuff more, now that you’re not so depleted all the time (I actually learned to enjoy mowing the lawn, which used to make me cry in despair every time).

Dealing with your knee-jerk, culturally indoctrinated reactions to doing things this way is going to be your greatest challenge. This is a transformational process. It will entirely change the way you live your life, what you see as important, and how you feel. But it takes practice. The resistance you will feel at first is a normal response to going against cultural norms. It can feel like you’re breaking some kind of law (you are, a cultural law). That’s why the question, “Is someone going to come and arrest me?” can be an effective counter.

You’re going to have to fight with yourself for a while around this, because cultural indoctrination runs deep. It took me some years to get to a place where most of my decisions are energy based. Yes, it means I end up not getting a lot of things done. I’ve realized I never needed to do most of those things anyway. Like I said, the answer really is to do less. And what a difference this makes in the quality of my life. I feel like I’m living my life, rather than it passing me by in overstuffed chunks of time I’ll never get back.