“Are you tired because of what you’re doing — or because of what you’re avoiding?”
The Case for Energy Over Time
You can’t add more hours to the day. But you can change the quality of the hours you have.
Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace found 76% of employees experience burnout at least sometimes, with 28% reporting it very often or always. Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index named the “infinite workday” — work extending into evenings and weekends, fragmenting into a triple-peak day. What’s running out isn’t time. It’s energy.
Sources: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace (2024); Microsoft, Work Trend Index (2024).
Four Sources of Energy
Adapted from Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr, The Power of Full Engagement (2003). Schwartz and Loehr named four dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. I use “purposeful” in place of “spiritual” — same idea, different language for a business audience.
Physical Energy
Sleep, movement, nutrition, recovery. Everything else rests on this.
Common drains:
- Back-to-back meetings with no breaks
- Poor sleep treated as a badge of honour
- Ignoring the body’s signals until something breaks
Renewal:
- Protect sleep as a leadership decision, not a luxury
- Move during the day, not only at the gym
- Rest before you’re exhausted
Emotional Energy
The quality of what you feel shapes the quality of how you lead.
Common drains:
- Unresolved conflict you keep walking past
- Suppressing frustration until it leaks out sideways
- Carrying other people’s emotional weight without noticing
Renewal:
- Name what you’re feeling, even privately
- Set boundaries on the emotional labour you absorb
- Protect one relationship that genuinely restores you
Mental Energy
Focus is finite. Attention is the currency.
Common drains:
- Constant context-switching between apps and conversations
- Decision fatigue from low-stakes choices
- Information in, no time to process it
Renewal:
- Batch similar tasks instead of interleaving them
- Automate or delegate decisions that don’t need you
- Schedule thinking time, not only meeting time
Purposeful Energy
The multiplier. When this is strong, the other three recover faster.
Common drains:
- Work disconnected from what matters to you
- Living someone else’s definition of success
- Never stopping long enough to ask “why am I doing this?”
Renewal:
- Reconnect daily tasks to a reason you care about
- Revisit your definition of success each quarter
- Spend time with people who remind you why you started
Five noticing prompts for next week
Not a test. A week-long experiment. Carry these with you and notice — don’t fix, don’t fight, just notice.
- When in my week do I feel most alive? What’s happening in that moment?
- What am I doing when I feel most drained — and what’s underneath it?
- Which relationships top me up, and which ones empty me?
- Where am I spending energy on things I don’t actually value?
- What would I do differently tomorrow if I took my energy as seriously as my calendar?
The energy conversation most leaders avoid
When leaders come to coaching tired, they almost always want to talk about workload. Workload is real. But after a few sessions, a different conversation usually surfaces.
It isn’t the volume of work that’s draining them. It’s the misalignment — the meetings they don’t believe in, the decisions they disagree with but have to deliver, the performance they’re putting on because they think that’s what leadership requires. That kind of work costs more energy per hour than anything else.
The leaders I coach don’t usually need more time. They need to stop spending energy in places that don’t pay them back.
Running on empty?
If you’re tired in a way that a weekend doesn’t fix, it’s worth a conversation. Book a free discovery call — no pressure, no pitch.
Last reviewed: April 2026