The Real Problem with Time Management
Many executives I coach at some point ask for the same thing: better time management techniques. And they’re right to do so: time is finite and too often we put off what’s most important and spend time on activities that that matter little to performance. They want the holy grail that will unlock peak performance for themselves and their teams.
The reason for this are diverse and I’ll save this subject for another day.
While time management has its place in a leader’s repertoire, there’s a more powerful lever that gets far less attention: energy management.
Here’s why it matters: time is finite, but energy is malleable. You can’t create more hours in the day, but you can dramatically influence how much energy you and your team have to deploy during those hours. At the end of the day, performance is much more correlated with energy management.
Your Body Budget: A New Framework for Performance
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett introduced a concept that should fundamentally change how you think about your leadership: the body budget. Like a bank account, the brain constantly manages energy deposits (sleep, nutrition, positive social connections) and withdrawals (stress, cognitive load, poor workplace dynamics).
When budget runs into deficit, performance suffers. Decision-making deteriorates. Innovation stalls, motivation wilts. You become moody and frequently opt for cognitive short cuts e.g. you stop listening to understand. Your best people eventually burn out when the deficit is chronic.
The Stress Paradox Every Leader Must Understand
Many of my clients want to eliminate stress entirely. That would be a fools errand and a mistake.
Stress is a biological function designed to help you meet challenges and return to balance. The acute stress before a board presentation? That’s your system optimizing performance. The excitement of flow state when tackling a meaningful challenge? That’s stress working for you.
The problem isn’t stress itself—it’s chronic stress.
When Stress Becomes a Liability
Our stress response evolved to handle physical threats: lions, bears, immediate danger. It wasn’t designed for the relentless psychological demands of modern work—endless emails, ambiguous expectations, back-to-back meetings, always-on culture.
When your brain constantly anticipates being thrown out of balance, you don’t just feel anxious. According to neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, you develop traits that actively impair leadership effectiveness: anxiety, hostility, paranoia. Your decision-making suffers. Your working memory weakens. You become more habitual, less adaptive.
Chronic stress also carries serious long-term costs: metabolic problems, declining cognitive abilities, and ultimately, burnout—for you and your team.
The Leadership Imperative: Protect Your and Your Team’s Energy Budget
Working in balance isn’t a management luxury or soft—it’s essential for sustainable performance. Better health, better decisions, better results. All flow from managing energy, not just time.
Five High-Impact Energy Actions for Leaders
1. Build a culture of genuine listening
Make “listening to understand” a core competency tied to performance metrics. This creates body budget deposits that fuel engagement and trust.
2. Confront behavior that drains social energy
Identify and address actions that undermine belonging and psychological safety. When the stress-response is constant, these become silent killers of team energy budgets.
3. Recognize and reinforce collaboration
Actively acknowledge behaviors that build psychological safety. Recognition multiplies these deposits across your organization and reinforces the values you appreciate.
4. Elevate recovery as performance strategy
Monitor energy levels explicitly. Make recovery part of how you define sustainable performance, not a sign of weakness. Remember, high performance elite athletes eventually realize that recovery is as important than quality training.
5. Create boundaries against systemic overload
When organizational demands chronically exceed your team’s energy capacity, you must create protective boundaries. This is leadership courage.
The Bottom Line
The path to sustainable high performance isn’t necessarily working more hours. It’s also optimizing your team’s energy budget—maximizing deposits while minimizing wasteful withdrawals. This means creating an organization that encourages behaviors that make energy deposits and discourages attitudes and behaviors that trigger chronic stress and place people’s autonomic nervous systems on high alert,
When you build a culture that manages energy as strategically as you manage budgets and timelines, performance improvements aren’t just possible. They’re inevitable.
About the Author
David Ehrenthal is an Executive and Leadership Coach, Advisor, Confidant and a Principal of Mach10 Career & Leadership Coaching. David can be reached at dehrenthal@mach10career.com or 617-529-8795