Many of my clients ask me for help with “time management.” Their schedules are over-run with meetings, projects, and tasks that they worry will never get done. Although this is a common complaint in today’s workplace, I’m not convinced that this is actually a “time management” problem.

Undoubtedly there are people who have poor time management skills. They don’t prioritize their own work, instead letting other people’s “emergencies” or requests trump their own. They routinely underestimate how long it takes to do something. They chat when they should be working. They can’t order their own “To Do” lists from highest to lowest priority, opting to do the quick and easy thing, versus the critically important thing.

Still, many people CAN prioritize tasks and manage time, yet feel that they are treading (or under) water. When organizational skills and time management are in place but the client still feels “buried,” the likely culprit is lack of “energy management.”

Proactive energy management is two-fold. It includes:

1. Matching your peak focus and energy with your most important tasks, and

2. Stewarding your energy, by not consistently expending more than you have.

In this post, I am going to concentrate on #1: matching your peak energy with your most important tasks. To assess whether you might benefit from focusing on this aspect of energy management, ask yourself the following:

•Am I a morning, afternoon or night person, meaning, at what time of day am I most alert, energetic, and able to focus?

•Do I work on my most important priorities during the time that I am most energetic and alert? (Many people fit in important tasks when a window of opportunity presents itself, irrespective of their own energy.)

•Do I purposely schedule rote tasks for times when I know my energy and focus will dip? (Many people waste their high energy times on rote tasks, and then can’t gather their energy when they really need it.)

•Do I look at my schedule for the whole day (or better yet, the whole week) and do my best to schedule the most challenging and important work for my peak energy times?

Recently, I coached a client using this checklist. As a manager of a very busy department, she oversees a large team of people, and also, the operational aspects of her department. She is a morning person and notices that her energy is at its lowest ebb in the last two hours of her work day. She is a self-described “people person” who “sometimes struggles with budgets and reports and details.”

In looking at her answers to the questions above, she noticed the following:

-She would arrive at work with high enthusiasm, saying hello, chatting, and checking in with her staff. This was very energizing for her and the staff appreciated it. However, she tended to get drawn into discussions or other issues that were not her priority. Rather than settling down to her own work, she might spend the first couple of hours “putting out fires” that she had not planned on, and that were not necessarily her own.

-She tended to procrastinate about tasks requiring report review or preparation, especially if meticulous attention to detail was needed. Because she didn’t really enjoy these tasks, she would tend to put them off until the end of her day, when her energy was lowest. Then she would really struggle to get anything done, or done well.

In realizing this, she saw the mismatch between her energy and her tasks. As an experiment, she decided to start her day by spending no more than 10 minutes greeting her staff and checking in. If an issue surfaced, she triaged it right away. She used her morning to work on reports and budgets, since this was a time of high mental acuity. She reserved the end of the day for making contact with the staff, and managing routine tasks, as these were both pleasant and easy for her to do, even with a little less energy.

We all know the difference between working for an hour when we are “on fire” versus working for an hour when we are struggling to concentrate or stay awake. Simply riding the wave of one’s own biorhythms can make a significant difference in using what time you have to better advantage.

If you have any tips related to peak energy management, please share them in the comments below.