Victor Cheng on mental energy units

I am a regular follower of Victor Cheng’s writings. His article on mental energy units impressed so much and I recommend it for you to read too. Below is the modified article.

There are 24 hours in a day. You allocate them according to what is most important to you. As you progress in your professional career, it makes sense to optimise your life around a different kind of metric.

Instead of managing time (e.g. hours), I find it more helpful to manage mental energy. I have developed a phrase that I call “Mental Energy Units,” or MEU in short.

I first got introduced to the idea of managing energy, rather than time, from the book The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. 

Here is the main idea. Time and energy are not the same things. Let us say you have 16 waking hours in a day. For the sake of simplicity, let us also say you have 16 mental energy units per day. Some activities consume far more MEUs than the hours it takes to perform the actual activity.

For example, dealing with a rude and obnoxious prospective client might take up one hour of my day, but it might easily consume 16 mental energy units. One bad conversation at 9am can ruin my whole day. 

When I talk to a good friend for one hour, it not only does not use up any mental energy units, it actually creates energy for me. The same is true when I go dancing or spend time in nature. These activities produce MEUs.

When I write, the first one or two hours of writing is one-for-one. One hour of writing consumes one MEU. However, when I am at my third or fourth hour of writing for the day, the “cost” goes up. By the time I reach my fifth hour of writing for the day, each incremental hour is costing me three to four MEUs.

If I spend an entire week writing five hours a day, by Friday I am so mentally exhausted that I want to throw my computer out of the window. As you might imagine, I tend to stop writing before I get to that point. Most people have a low awareness of their energy levels. Those that do have such awareness often do not manage and optimise their life around that unit of measure.

Everyone’s “Hour-to-MEU” ratio varies by individual and across activities. When I think about doing personal and corporate taxes, the MEU load is seven MEU units per hour devoted the topic of taxes. I hate the complexity and detail of taxes. This is why I have a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) who deals with most of it for me.

When I avoid one hour of dealing with taxes, I free up seven MEUs. When I write articles like this one that uses up one MEU per article, I am writing at a modest pace. When you think about your energy in this way, as an investable and consumable resource, it prompts you to make different decisions.

When that telemarketer calls you on the phone, they are sucking up your MEUs. How long are you going to stay on the phone before hanging up? When you have a toxic person in your life, they are sucking dozens of MEUs with every interaction. How long are you going to allow the status quo to persist?

When you work in a job, profession, or industry you despise, an eight-hour work day is consuming 20 plus MEUs each day. This is known as burnout.

Don’t just pay attention to and manage your time. Instead, pay attention to, manage and optimise your life around your mental energy.

Thanks,

Victor Cheng

Founder, CaseInterview.com.