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Matt Mochary’s Mochary Method Curriculum
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Energy Audit (3 min)
(I learned this exercise from Diana Chapman of the Conscious Leadership Group.)
It is essential to maximize your energy. You perform best when you are doing things that energize you. There is excellent brain science around this from Robert Sapolsky of Stanford. His work is so good that I recommend you access it directly by reading Behave or listening to his explanation in this video: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (1h13m).
Your goal should be to spend most of your time (75-80%) doing things that energize you. If you do, magic will occur.
Get two highlighters, pens, or pencils of different colors (red and green are ideal, but any will do). Print out the last two weeks of your calendar (from the past, not the future) when you were working, and that is representative of your everyday experience (i.e., if you did something unusual in the last two weeks like go on a big trip, then pick the two weeks prior). Add in activities you did in between meetings, before work, and after work. If you don't have a printer, do this.
Go through each workday hour-by-hour and ask yourself, "Did that activity give me energy or drain my energy?" Highlight those that gave you energy in green and red those that did not provide you with energy. There are no neutrals; every hour must be marked one color or the other. If an hour does not give you energy, it is red. (If you want to take a shortcut, you can just mark the reds.)
When finished, write out a list of each of the reds.
Then group those activities into similar buckets. (i.e., 1-1 meetings, recruiting meetings, etc.)
For each type of activity that does not raise your energy, write down ways to:
Turn each of these into actions with due dates and put them in your Task Manager.
Keep doing this Energy Audit each month until you're spending 75% or more doing things that give you energy. If you do, you will achieve far more in less time because you will perform far better. You will be in your Zone of Genius.
There are some common actions that don't give people energy. To these, you need to say "no!" Here are some ways to do that: