When managers talk about being overwhelmed, the first thing they usually point to is time. I’ve worked with loads over the years who have come to me for help with how they’re feeling. It’s actually something that I really enjoy doing and there are common trends that appear when I ask what the cause of the issue is:
- “My calendar is full.”
- “I don’t have enough hours.”
- “There just isn’t space for all of this work.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, these things may sometimes be true.
But more often than we realise, the real constraint isn’t time – which is what the implication of all of these is. They imply “if only I had more time”…
It’s usually not time that needs to be managed.
It’s energy.
To give you an example, you can have a free afternoon in your calendar and still feel incapable of making a good decision or getting that big project done that’s been on your to-do list for weeks. You have every intention of doing it but it just doesn’t happen.
Another example is when you have a short, but intense meeting which leaves you feeling more drained than a whole afternoon of deep work.
You technically spend more time on the deep work, but it’s the short meeting that has the biggest impact on your energy.
Being an effective leader isn’t just a time management or productivity challenge. It’s an energy management one and this only becomes more important as you become more senior.
If you focus more on time than energy, performance will quietly slip over time. Not because you’re lazy or not working hard, but because your energy is depleted.
Why time isn’t the real bottleneck
Time is very visible and tangible – we have 24 hours in a day and most workplaces will expect us to spend 7-8 hours each weekday on work. It’s easy for us to think about our work in hours.
It’s not so easy to see our energy and to understand how that energy gets used.
You can see a calendar packed full of meetings.
You can’t see (and it may be hard to feel) cognitive fatigue, emotional load or decision exhaustion.
But those invisible drains are often what make leadership feel heavy.
Think about a typical week. As a manager and leader, you’re probably:
- Switching between strategic thinking and operational detail.
- Regulating your own reactions in difficult conversations.
- Absorbing pressure from above (and below!)
- Supporting team members through their challenges.
- Responding to messages and emails constantly.
None of this necessarily looks dramatic or feels particularly out of the ordinary. After all, this is all part of the job, right?
Yes, it is. But these things being part of the job can mean that we don’t see a need to actively manage how we feel and the energy that we use on these things.
The impact of all of these things can compound over time and drain your energy.
Leadership isn’t physically exhausting in most cases, it’s cognitively and emotionally expensive.
And cognitive load doesn’t care whether you technically “have time.”
So, where does your energy actually go?
Many leaders are tired without fully understanding why. They get to the end of their working day and feel exhausted, yet it’s hard to point to what they “got done” that day.
But it’s not like you did nothing!
Here are some of the most common drains on your energy as a manager.
Decision fatigue
Every decision, even the small ones, consumes mental energy. Before you make a decision, you think:
- Approve this or ask for changes?
- Escalate or wait?
- Intervene or let them handle it?
- Push back or accept?
Then even after you’ve made a call, you may question it and wonder if you’ve done the right thing. Or do my team agree with me? Do they think I’m being silly or stupid?
Individually, these are manageable thoughts to have and again.. Collectively, they erode clarity.
By the end of a day where you’ve used up a lot of energy on these things, the quality of more decisions or other types of work drops. You’re still capable, you still have the skills and experience that you had before, but your energy is depleted.
Emotional regulation
Good leadership requires composure and a steady hand. This doesn’t mean that you need to remove all emotion from your role or hide emotion from people. But it does mean that you need to be the person in the room who is:
- Staying calm when others are frustrated.
- Responding thoughtfully instead of reacting.
- Holding back immediate judgments.
- Managing your own stress quietly.
The thing is, doing these things takes energy and we don’t realise it.
Context switching
When you become a manager and naturally take on more responsibilities, you need to learn how to switch mental gears quickly between different contexts.
On any given day, you may need to move between:
- Team performance reviews.
- Budget discussions.
- Client issues.
- Team morale.
- Strategic planning.
Each time that you switch between these different types of tasks comes at a cost to your mental energy.
Over a week, that cost compounds.
How to manage your mental energy instead of just managing time
If energy is the real constraint, the question becomes:
How do you protect and manage it deliberately?
Here are some practical ways that make a measurable difference.
1. Protect high-energy windows
Not all hours in the day are equal.
Try to notice when your thinking is sharpest. For many people (but not all) it’s in the morning. So it’s best to use these windows for things like:
- Strategic thinking.
- Important decisions.
- Complex problem-solving.
- Difficult conversations.
Then when you know that your energy drops a little, you can shift to things like:
- Admin.
- Routine updates.
- Lighter tasks.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this means that these tasks aren’t important. Far from it, they need to be done and done well. But take into account that they require a different level of mental energy compared with other tasks.
You probably don’t need more time, you need better alignment between your mental energy and task type.
2. Reduce unnecessary decisions
You can’t solve decision fatigue by willpower alone. It’s solved by removing choices and simplifying as much as possible.
Consider:
- Standardising meeting structures.
- Creating clear escalation criteria.
- Defining decision rights and who can make them instead of you.
- Setting communication norms.
The fewer trivial decisions you make, the more energy remains for meaningful ones.
3. Create thinking space (and don’t feel guilty about it)
I believe very strongly that you should fiercely protect your time, meaning that you keep as much control as possible over your calendar. Sure, there may be times when you have to make a call at a time that isn’t ideal for your mental energy, but you should do as much as possible to control it.
I’m also a huge advocate of blocking out time in your week for deep work or thinking. Then when this time is blocked out, your time is not allowed to book meetings over the top of it.
But many managers feel guilty about this because it may look indulgent or unproductive. They may feel guilty because they need to say no to their team sometimes.
It’s worth it though because protected thinking time:
- Reduces reactive decisions.
- Improves clarity.
- Lowers stress.
- Prevents unnecessary work later.
If you don’t create space for thinking, urgency will fill it for you.
4. Understand the difference between urgent and important
Nothing drains your energy quite like everything feeling urgent.
Give yourself (and your team) a chance by distinguishing between:
- What truly needs immediate action.
- What can wait.
- What simply feels uncomfortable.
For example, if you’re in the middle of a task and a team member comes over to you to ask for help, it’s completely reasonable to ask if their need is urgent or if it can wait an hour or two. The chances are that it’s important but not urgent, so you can crack on with your task and still help your team member a little later.
Clarity on urgent vs. important reduces panic and reduced panic preserves energy.
Ultimately, leadership isn’t about managing time effectively. It’s about managing your energy intelligently.
When your energy is stable:
- Your decisions improve.
- Your patience increases.
- Your communication sharpens.
- Your team feels safer.
And when your energy is depleted, everything becomes harder than it needs to be.
The goal isn’t to do less.
It’s to protect the energy capacity that allows you to lead well.
