Ever feel like some days fly by and others drag? You’re working the same hours, sitting at the same desk, but some tasks light you up while others are so painful they send you looking for YouTube videos to watch instead.
This is where an Energy Map can be a helpful tool to assess your energy and engagement throughout the week. It’s simple: take a look at your typical week, jot down the activities you’re doing and note how it makes you feel. You’re not looking for moments of happiness or sadness, but rather engagement and deep focus.
In design thinking and product design, a journey map is a tool used for mapping activities to find points of friction. They typically include the charting of activities over time – the X axis – and emotion on the Y axis.
The Energy Map works in much the same way. It’s a companion tool to the Good Time Journal from Designing Your Life.
The goal is to spot patterns in the work and life activities – finding out which ones light you up and which leave you feeling less energized.
Here’s why this matters:
Energy is your best career guide. A resume tells you where you’ve been, but energy tells you where you should be going. If certain tasks consistently engage you, that’s a sign you need more of them in your life. It may also be a clue into an activity that could cause a healthy obsession towards mastery.
You might be wrong about what fuels you. We assume we should enjoy certain activities. But tracking your energy in real-time often reveals surprising truths. Maybe that “prestigious” project is actually soul-crushing, while an unexpected side task keeps you in flow for hours.
I once led a project that had a large set of operational deliverables, but one small task seemed to call to me. The project needed a simple website built. Instead of passing that off to an experienced web designer, I decided to learn to code and try to build it. I spent hours learning and experimenting with basic HTML (this was before website builders and Google Sites). For all intensive purposes I should have been focusing on the other 800 important things that the project required. But I got obsessed. I’ve since learned that these moments of obsession, where you can’t stop doing an activity, even if you know you should be doing something else, is one of the key indicators of flow.
It was after this project that I realized I was more interested in learning and building new things than operationalizing plans with spreadsheets and project management software. That awareness has steered my career ever since.
It helps you redesign your day. If you know when and where you hit your peak energy, you can schedule important work accordingly. If you know what drains you, you can build in breaks or find ways to delegate. In our DYL workshops, we teach a change strategy called resequencing: can you find a new timeslot for draining work that makes it less draining? Maybe between two energizing activities?
Ready to try it? Download the Energy Map template
The Energy Map isn’t about overhauling your week instantly. It’s about small, intentional shifts toward work that gives you life. And in a world where burnout is the default, knowing what fuels you is a competitive advantage.
Try it for a week. You might be surprised by what you find. Download the Energy Map Worksheet to get started.
By Adam Allred
Partner at DYL
