Energy Management and Productivity: What Science Can Teach Us

I ended my work week on Friday thinking to myself, how is it only week 2 of 2021? Time is of course incredibly meaningless but also at the same time incredibly insistent. 

I started the week with a great meeting with my director who got the idea of managing my energy in my head and it has been rattling in there for a few days. I think the concept of energy management is so important, especially in this culture of productivity, where there is this expectation that every day, every week, every month, every year should be bookended by some tangible marker of something that you have produced and brought into society for use. 

For academics our productivity is usually measured in article or book coffee spoons. But being able to engage with anything that requires real reflection, research, and organization in the middle of a pandemic is a lot. For educational developers this productivity marker is a bit different and is more about how many instructors you have supported, how many resources you have created, how many initiatives you have started and completed, that kind of thing. I always try to do all the things, which in my humble opinion, is possible the best meme that ever was memed. So I outlined all the things I wanted to do this term and prioritized them, which is when my director said, we want to be cognizant of managing your energy- which of course is so true. 

Science folk will be able to have a nice conversation about all the lovely equations that can be used to explain everything that happens in our daily lives in relation to energy management and productivity. You know the whole, body at rest tends to stay at rest (Newton's first), or work (Force x displacement), or efficiency (output/cost or work out/work in). But we often don't think about energy management in such terms and maybe we need to start so that we can see how all of these different forces are working on us. 

A good example if this is how I know that I have not ate well this week and that certainly affected my efficiency, my ability to be productive (on whatever measurement scale we are using), and my ability to just stop and reflect on all the things. So yesterday I made a nice hearty soup and thought about how I can put more things into place to just keep up my energy levels by making sure I am eating regularly, and as well as I can. It seems so obvious, but when you have so many plates in the air, the easiest thing to forget is food. 

And sometimes it is not just food that you need, but also just being in community. I started thinking about this when I was reading a book yesterday (see the reviews below), about how when you work for a "company" it suggests that you will be in society or collaboration with others, whereas if you work at an "institution" the etymology suggests that there is already something established, something in practice, and that does not necessarily mean being in society or collaboration with others. If you are lucky (like I am) your institution may bring with it some great company (or colleagues). But the pandemic makes being in company with others so much more difficult. 

I have had many conversations with faculty who say that being in class with students provides the company, the energy, that frames their pedagogy. Teaching in-person is the interaction of Newton's first, and the equation for work in physics, and we have to find a way to translate that in some tangible way to a remote pedagogy. For me, teaching a synchronous evening class on Thursdays this term, that physics work of displacement is being done by how much excitement I express via webcam. I know this because golly I was tired when 8pm on Thursday came rolling around, and I had to send my upstairs neighbour a text apologizing for how loud I was going to be for 2hrs every week for the remainder of term. This is also energy management. 

Energy management is in part an awareness of how much you have in you to give, and how much you need to stop, and not overload your to do list, so you can have something to give. It is an awareness of it being okay if you don't have anything to give and being able to flag that for others. So whether you are a science person who can express this in a formula, or an arts and humanities person who expresses it in songs, poetry, or any other textual means- energy management and awareness is in part how we are going to get through all this.

Books I Read Last Week

Entering Sappho  by Sarah Dowling

Review of Entering Sappho Here

How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

Review of How to do Nothing Here