On Form

by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Feeling forever starved for time, we assume that we have no choice but to cram as much as possible into every day. But managing time efficiently is no guarantee that we will bring sufficient energy to whatever it is we are doing.

Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet, but rather how much energy we invest in the time that we have.

Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.

Along the way, we discovered something completely unexpected: The performance demands that most people face in their everyday work environments dwarf those of any professional athletes we have ever trained. How is that possible? It’s not as anomalous as it seems. Professional athletes typically spend about 90 percent of their time training, in order to be able to perform 10 percent of the time. Their entire lives are designed around expanding, sustaining and renewing the energy they need to compete for short, focused periods of time. At a practical level, they build very precise routines for managing energy in all spheres of their lives—eating and sleeping; working out and resting; summoning the appropriate emotions; mentally preparing and staying focused; and connecting regularly to the mission they have set for themselves.

PRINCIPLE 1: Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

PRINCIPLE 2: Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

To maintain a powerful pulse in our lives, we must learn how to rhythmically spend and renew energy.

PRINCIPLE 3: To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.

We grow at all levels by expending energy beyond our ordinary limits and then recovering.

PRINCIPLE 4: Positive energy rituals—highly specific routines for managing energy—are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

Energy is simply the capacity to do work. Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and recover energy.

We call this rhythmic wave oscillation, and it represents the fundamental pulse of life.

Periods of recovery are likewise intrinsic to creativity and to intimate connection. Sounds become music in the spaces between notes, just as words are created by the spaces between letters.

Bruce’s first recovery strategy was walking up and down a dozen flights of stairs in his office building. The second was juggling.

For Mark Ethridge, a former managing editor of The Charlotte Observer, the costs of his own addiction seemed clearer. “More and more what I find is that you don’t really live in the present anymore,” he explained. “You’re never fully engaged in what you’re doing at any given moment, because what you really want to do is finish it in order to get on to something else. You kind of skim along the surface of life. It’s very frustrating.”