Designing a Week Around Your Energy System
Most diaries are built around time. Slots, meetings, deadlines. Yet when leaders talk about feeling “off their game” or “behind”, they’re usually describing an energy problem, not a time problem.
In Balancing Act, the Mental-Physical Paradigm, the Energy Mapping Grid and the Daily Calibration Practice form an “Energy Calibration System”, a structured way to design weeks around how your system actually works, rather than how your calendar defaults.
Seeing Your Week Through an Energy Lens: Your energy system includes physical stamina, mental clarity, emotional bandwidth, and sense of purpose. These don’t rise and fall at random. They follow patterns shaped by sleep, nutrition, relational load, and the kind of work you’re doing.
Common patterns leaders discover when they map energy for a week:
- Mornings where strategic thinking flows easily, but is wasted on email
- Afternoons where back-to-back meetings erode patience and perspective
- Days where key tasks always slip because the energy available doesn’t match the task type
Energy Mapping turns this from a vague frustration into usable information.
Matching Work to Energy
A more sustainable week often comes from small shifts rather than a total redesign:
- Placing your highest-consequence decisions in windows where mental and emotional scores are genuinely higher
- Grouping similar tasks to reduce cognitive switching
- Scheduling conversations that carry emotional weight at times you are less depleted
- Protecting short “white space” gaps between demanding blocks to reset your nervous system
In Balancing Act, this is reinforced through the four foundations of integrated performance: preventive maintenance, performance monitoring, recovery programming, and environmental design.
A Practical Energy Week Exercise
Over the next week:
- Take the Energy Mapping Grid (from the book or Resource Hub) and rate your physical, mental, emotional and purpose levels for morning, afternoon, evening each day (1–10).
- Note what kind of work you’re doing in each block.
- At the end of the week, ask:
- Where did I put my most demanding work?
- Which tasks always felt uphill?
- One change that would make next week more realistic for my energy system?
Then adjust one thing: perhaps moving strategic thinking blocks into your best mental window, or clustering high-emotion meetings on one day and protecting the next morning for recovery and planning.
How the Book Supports the Shift: This article gives the concept. Balancing Act gives you the templates, case examples, and calibration prompts that turn it into repeatable practice. The Calibration Toolkit includes:
- Energy Mapping Grid
- Daily Calibration Practice
- Paradigm Calibration and Milestone Calibration for longer-range planning
If you haven’t yet read the book, it’s worth doing so alongside your first Energy Mapping week. The tools and examples will give language to what you’re noticing and show how to connect energy design to your Money-Mission and Work-Life decisions over time.
