This post contains my personal notes about the big ideas in Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz’s. My book notes are different from many of the book summaries you’ll find on the web. Instead of following the structure of the book in question, we’ll isolate and examine the key ideas and themes that make the book useful. Along the way, I’ll tell you how I actually apply the ideas.

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Most businesspeople focus on managing time, which is misleading: true effectiveness is more about managing and investing your energy, and that starts by paying close attention to your body. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz’s describes how to optimize your daily energy levels by improving your daily habits and routines. About Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz are the authors of the Personal MBA-recommended book. For more information about Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz’s work, check out. Here are 10 big ideas from Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz’s 1: Time is not the most important thing to manage - energy is what’s actually important. Most productivity thinkers over the years have fixated on the idea of time: there are only so many hours in a day, so if you want to be an effective person, you should learn to manage them wisely. Time, however, passes on its own - you can’t really manage it.

What you can manage is the energy you bring to those hours. If you’re low on energy, it doesn’t matter if you have a lot of time to accomplish a task - you’ll be so exhausted that you’ll make very little progress. If you have a ton of energy, you can get many things done in very little time. Is about managing your energy, and helping you find ways to feel more energetic each day. 2: Wise use of available energy is what leads to results.

Energy is finite, but expandable. You only have so much energy to use each day, but our capacity for productive effort expands as we use it. As long as you take care of yourself and pay attention to how much energy you have, you can accomplish surprising amounts of work. 3: All hours aren’t created equal - pay attention to your energy cycles, which naturally oscillate. Time management proponents make the mistake of assuming all hours are fungible - equal to any other.

On a calendar, there’s no visible difference between 9:00-10:00am and 12:00-1:00pm. Physically, there’s a huge difference. Our body operates in in which our energy fluctuates up and down. You may be familiar with the circadian cycle, which is responsible for our waking/sleeping pattern. There are other cycles as well, which naturally oscillates every 90 minutes between high and low energy.

This cycle is normal, so it pays to respect it. Murder set pieces torrent. Every hour and a half or so, your body needs a bit of relaxation and rest. Powering through the dip in energy is actually counterproductive - you’re not giving your body the rest it needs to operate at peak performance.

4: Energy diminishes with overuse and underuse - it’s best to think in terms of sprinting and recovery. When working, think like a sprinter - you can cover a lot of ground in a quick burst, but you can’t keep up that pace all day.

With a little rest between bursts, however, you can sprint over and over again. If you tax yourself too much, you’ll wear yourself out, and you’ll need a longer period of recovery before you’ll be ready to go again. At the extreme, some people work themselves to the point of exhaustion, at which point their body forces them to recover via injury or illness. You can only push yourself so much - is mandatory, not optional.

5: You are not a machine: humans need relaxation, rest, and recovery for top performance. The ideal many people seem to have about human productivity is working like a robot: no rest, no food, no sleep, no recovery all day every day. That’s a recipe for disaster.