The Way We're Working Isn't Working

Photo by Matus Hatala on Unsplash

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The leaders I work with aren't drained because they hate their work. It's the opposite. They love it.

One is a technical director three months into a role she was built for. The solving is the part that energizes her; what wears her down is everything around her core competency — the energy it takes to keep a project moving when the hard part was never the math. Another runs an organization with a mission she'd run through a wall for. The mission doesn't drain her. What drains her is how much energy gets spent on things that have nothing to do with it. A third is so good at her technical work that she's trying to pivot out of it — not because she's tired of the work, but because she's tired of watching so much energy disappear into friction that doesn't have to be there.

None of them have a work problem, and none of them are short on hours. What they have is an energy problem — and it isn't how many hours they work, it's how those hours get spent. Most of them have already figured out the first half of the answer: pouring more time into it doesn't solve it. More hours, more push, one more system — none of it moves the thing. What they haven't named yet is the other half. The drain won't ease until two things change: how the interactions around the work actually go, and how much of their own energy they're losing along the way. Get those right, and there's finally something left for the job they actually came to do.

Time is the wrong thing to manage

Time is finite and equally distributed. You get the same twenty-four hours as everyone who has ever lived. You cannot save it, stretch it, or earn more of it. Every time-management system ever invented is, underneath, a slightly different way of slicing the same fixed pie thinner.

So when you feel like you're running out of time, you're half right. You are. Everyone always is. That's the nature of the thing. Managing it harder doesn't change the amount — it just makes you more efficient at spending a resource that was always going to run out.

Meanwhile, the resource that actually determines what you do with those hours gets almost no attention at all.

Energy is the resource you're ignoring

Put two people in the same twenty-four hours. Same meetings, same workload, same demands. One ends the day depleted and resentful; the other ends it tired but clear, having done work that mattered. The difference between them isn't time. They had identical amounts. The difference is energy — physical, mental, emotional.

Unlike time, energy is variable. And unlike time, it's renewable. You can have more of it tomorrow than you had today. You can spend it deliberately or bleed it unconsciously. This is the shift the whole productivity industry skips: stop managing time you can't make more of, and start managing energy you can.

That's not a softer idea. It's a more rigorous one. Because it forces a harder question than "how do I fit more in?" It asks: what is actually draining me, and what actually restores me — and am I being honest about both?

The biggest leak isn't your calendar

For most leaders who love their work, the largest drain isn't the workload — it's how the hours get spent. Energy leaks out through low-workability interaction: the problem that keeps resurfacing because it never really got resolved, the conversation that defends instead of moves, the meeting that generates heat instead of direction. The people aren't the problem. It's that the way everyone's interacting is costing more energy than it needs to — and that's something you can actually change. You can't time-block your way out of it, because it was never a time problem.

I worked with a leader who described himself, almost cheerfully, as "angry Monday through Friday." Same week, he told me about a vacation that fell apart — wrong stop, a train stuck for hours, luggage that never made it home — and through every bit of it, he chose calm. Someone close to him actually noticed: I'm kind of proud of you. So I asked the obvious question. Why is that calm available to you on a broken-down train in a foreign country, but not on an ordinary Tuesday at your desk?

He knew the answer before I finished asking. Anger is fuel for a hard set at the gym — useful in a short burst. But run it as your default operating setting five days a week and it doesn't make you sharper. It just empties you out by Friday and follows you home.

Here's the part that frees people: you can't control the friction around you — the personalities, the pace, the things other people do and don't do. You never could. What you have — always — is influence over how you meet it, how much of it you carry, and what you let run you. The drain feels like it's coming at you from the outside. The setting it runs on is yours.

Two kinds of action

Once you start paying attention to energy, your day splits into two types of action, and most people only count one of them as real work.

The first is recharge action — what restores energy so you can keep going. Sleep, real rest, movement, the conversation that fills you back up, the hour with no agenda. Even, sometimes, the simple decision to not pick up the rope in a tug-of-war that isn't yours. Most driven people treat recharge as the reward they'll get to after the work, which is exactly backwards. It isn't what you earn once the work is done. It's what makes the work possible.

The second is generative action — creating something from nothing. The strategy, the hard conversation, the thing only you can do. This is the work that actually moves your leadership forward, and it costs the most energy of anything you do. You cannot do it from empty. When you're depleted, you don't stop working — you downgrade to busywork, the low-energy shuffling of tasks that feels productive and changes nothing.

A depleted leader doing busywork looks identical to a productive one from the outside. The calendar is full either way. Only one of them is building something.

And here's the trap I see most: the leaders who love their work pour their energy into the friction and call it the job — then have nothing left for the work that was actually theirs to do. The thing they most want to build keeps getting displaced by the thing in front of them. That's not a priorities problem. It's an energy-allocation problem they've never named.

Why this matters more than it feels like it does

Burnout doesn't announce itself. It doesn't send a calendar invite. It arrives as a slow erosion you adapt to one degree at a time, until depleted becomes your baseline and you forget there was another way to feel.

In coaching I talk about the messages life sends. They start as ping-pong balls — a short fuse with someone who didn't deserve it, a Sunday that already feels like Monday, a passion that's started to feel like a grind. Ignore them and they don't go away. They come back bigger. Tennis ball. Baseball. Eventually a bowling ball you can't ignore, usually wearing the face of a health scare, a relationship that's quietly given up, or a version of you the people closest to you don't recognize.

You don't have to wait for the bowling ball. That's the entire point. Pain is inevitable — some of it is just the cost of caring about hard things. But suffering all the way to the bowling ball, when the ping-pong ball was trying to tell you something months ago? That part is optional.

The better question

The shift from time to energy comes down to changing the question you ask yourself.

The time question is: Am I getting everything done? You'll never get a satisfying answer, because the list is infinite and the hours are fixed.

The energy question is: Is the way I'm working actually working — at what cost, and is it sustainable? That one you can answer honestly. And the moment you do, you usually already know what needs to change — and which drain you've been calling "just part of the job."

You don't need a better calendar. You need to stop spending yourself like the supply is endless, on friction that was never yours to carry. It isn't endless. None of ours is.

Managing your energy instead of your time is one of four shifts I keep coming back to. If it lands, the Shift In Life manifesto lays out the whole picture.

If you love what you do and it's still wearing you down, that's the conversation worth having. Let's talk →