Harnessing High Energy: Tips for Staying Productive

I met a young entrepreneur who was struggling with some of the challenges I did when I was his age. So what a grand opportunity to write up some of what I’ve learned as a VERY high energy human who still wants to get shit done.

1. exercise. you must set boundaries in your life to exercise. i find this hard when i’m either burnt out forcing myself to do shit i dont enjoy, or i’m manically excited about something and don’t want to stop. this is non-negotiable.

2. I structure work as kanban: minimise work in progress (i.e. finish what you started or explicitly stop it versus leaving it to be a zombie), pick the next most important item off my queue when the next thing comes up.

you have to structure your commitments such that this works. often it means being good about breaking things down or explaining that things are a Proof of Concept or an exploration with a very concrete endpoint.

3. you need to have free time in your schedule. people like us need to play and follow where our attention takes us to hyperfocus. if you’re overbooked, you can’t do this. play to your strengths.

4. speaking of playing to your strengths, take a page out of Drucker’s book and lean in here. surround yourself with people who get you and still find you valuable. this is why Matt Reed and I intially started working together. most people with his inclinations don’t tolerate a scattered explorer type. Reed is special because he understands what i am and still wants me around. he will say he “cleans up” after me but he doesnt mean that pejoratively.

i’m the marines who landed on the beaches, and he’s the army that secures those strongpoints.

find those buddies. tell them you love them early and often.

5. remember that if you start a whole bunch of projects you’re excited about, you may commit to things that later drag you down when you lose attention. be really clear with people and honest with yourself. this is a great way to kill the flexible time you need to suceed.

6. speaking of honesty, you need to be very honest with yourself about what you can accomplish realistically. think about what you get done on a “low energy” lack of excitement day. that’s your baseline. use standups to make sure you’re not losing track of things for more than a day. these checkins and accountability partners are essential.

7. “round robin” your questions to people rather than stop asking questions. i used to keep a list :)

8. taking good notes is essential. i write everything down in the same place and search it later. it’s useful because i often forget what i did and this makes it way faster to retrieve, plus it means all your dead-end explorations are easy to pick back up.

9. automate to avoid errors, not for scale. i can be given a 20 item checklist and the second time i do it, i’ll skip items 7 and 18 because i get bored and distracted. computers dgaf.

10. Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson - this book is amazing. 80% of what you need to do, you don’t need to reinvent. you can get the 80/20 solution out of here and implement it. fix it when it’s broken or tweak it to your needs. but dont get bogged down reinventing the wheel. the final chapter on managing yourself is also amazing.

Finally… remember that you’re not going to be able to force yourself into being something you’re not. Embrace who you are. Surf the waves instead of swimming against them. Some people won’t get it, and that’s just a lovely signal that you need to move on.