“Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”

– Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement

I want to challenge you on something this week.

We all know that data is critical, but I suspect that there are two incredibly important sources you’re not monitoring properly right now.  

Most leaders pride themselves on being exceptionally data-literate. They know their numbers. Revenue, margin, pipeline, NPS – they track it, review it, act on it. They would never run a business blind.

But when I ask them how their cognitive stores are holding up or where they are expending their emotional energy I’m frequently met with anything from blank stares through to answers that resemble someone trying to find the light switch in a dark room.

Here's the paradox: the same people who would never ignore a critical KPI in their business are routinely ignoring the most important performance data they have. Their own.

Time isn't your scarcest resource. It just feels that way.

We've all bought into the idea that time is the ultimate constraint. And yes, of course it matters. But time is easy to measure and allocating your resources can be managed effectively if you’re disciplined and intentional. 

By contrast, two of your most precious resources are far harder to manage and can be massive drains on performance if ignored:

1. Cognitive energy 

2. Emotional energy

Here’s why. 

Cognitive energy

A corporate culture that has mythologised the ‘harder, faster, stronger’ longer mentality ignores the hard evidence that neuroscience provides us with.

Your cognitive stores are finite and the prefrontal cortex (the brain's executive ‘HQ’, responsible for rational thinking, planning etc) is systematically depleted by the incessant stream of decisions a leader has to take. The challenge is that there’s no ‘clock’ you can keep an eye on like there is with time.

Think of it like running. You can sprint. You can run a marathon. What you cannot do is sprint a marathon. You will burn through your stores early and have nothing left when it matters most. 

I’m willing to bet everyone reading this knows what I’m talking about – you’ve felt that ‘tired but wired’ feeling too many times. You’ve experienced that ‘brain fog’ when you’re trying to work through a complex problem at 10pm.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister's research first identified this in the late 1990s – every decision made or problem solved draws from the same finite mental resource. In simple terms, neuroscience tells us the prefrontal cortex is metabolically expensive to run.

Time without cognitive energy is just hours. If you’re trying to ‘sprint’ mentally all day, with limited sleep and a brain that increasingly resembles a mobile phone battery in permanent ‘low power’ mode, you aren’t a high performer – you’re far more likely to be just existing in the ‘Simmering Six’, that killzone of performance where you’re trying your best but nowhere near your best.

Emotional energy

Emotional energy is harder to talk about, and harder to measure, which is exactly why it gets overlooked.

We've become so reliant on the external validation of wearables and so obsessed with hard data that we've lost the art and science of actually listening to ourselves and interpreting that data. 

Think about what you at your best actually looks like – that sense of ‘aliveness’. Now go to you at your worst and think about how you would define that. 

The answer is almost always the same – how you felt is what defined those points: I ‘felt’ on my A-game; I ‘felt’ a shadow of myself. Sound familiar?  

Two of the most common ways you can drain your emotional energy are also two of the most understandable: investing it in situations where you have no leverage over the outcome, and carrying it forward from situations that have already passed.

I know this because I've been guilty of both. For example, I burned through time and energy getting frustrated at decisions being made in a different time zone, by leadership far removed from our reality on the ground, that had direct, negative consequences for my team at the time. I couldn't change those decisions. I couldn't reverse what had already happened. But my ‘righteous anger’ was so seductive that I wallowed in it. 

In a world where my energy and time were my most important resources, the reality is that I wasted both. The even harsher truth is that I wasn’t serving my team by doing so. 

Neuroscience helps us understand quite how detrimental this can be. Research from Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten shows it's not just stress that depletes us, but the particular kind that comes from situations we feel we can't control. That's the most cognitively costly stress of all.

Tune In, Filter Out 

The beautiful thing about all of this is that your brain and body are more sophisticated than any wearable, any dashboard, or any piece of tech. The data is already there. 

Tuning into it is a trainable skill. Analysing it is a trainable skill.

My advice? Think like a scientist – build a hypothesis, test it, review the data. Act on it.

I was with a founder last week who's stopped reading the news every morning. Not because he’s stopped caring about the world, but because he realised that time spent consuming largely unactionable information was costing him more than it was giving him. 

It’s early days in his experiment, but so far it’s serving him well. The time spent getting stressed about world events he can’t affect now gets invested in his business and in family time.

Most importantly he is feeling better as a result of this decision. Less stress, more focus for the things that matter. Fewer inputs. Greater output. 

Time matters. I think what you do with your energy matters even more.

What’s your data telling you?

🔥  LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER  

The best content I researched this week:

1. This short clip from Mastery author Robert Greene ties in perfectly with my article this week – what question are you avoiding asking yourself?

2. A fascinating interview with the man behind the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Packed with the wisdom and insights you’d expect from a leader trusted to manage $2.1 trillion, including how the source of most of our poor decisions are, yep, you’ve guessed it, blind spots. 

3. Regular readers know how strongly I feel about the importance of cognitive health, so a new study showing that a brain exercise was linked to a 25% lower dementia risk caught my eye. The exercise was thought to contribute to something called ‘cognitive reserve’ – the brain’s ability to build resilience through learning.

4. Wrapping up this week with a very reflective read from author Tim Ferriss – are you doing self-help or is self-help doing you? It’s a question worth asking yourself and ties in a lot with my personal belief that great leadership is ultimately about serving others.