What does it mean that energy auditing?

Track what activities give you energy and what activities drain you over a typical week.

Example: A software engineer logs her energy across four dimensions for seven days. She discovers that pair programming sessions, which she had always classified as "draining meetings," consistently raise her mental and emotional energy by two to three points. Meanwhile, solo code reviews after 2 PM — work she considered easy and low-stress — drop her mental energy from a seven to a four within forty-five minutes. Her subjective narrative about what gives and takes energy is almost perfectly inverted from what the data shows. The audit does not change her activities. It changes her understanding of them, which changes everything about how she schedules her day.

Try this: Conduct a seven-day energy audit starting tomorrow. Set three to four daily alarms spaced across your waking hours — morning, midday, mid-afternoon, and evening. At each alarm, record the following in a simple spreadsheet or notebook: (1) what you have been doing for the past ninety minutes, (2) your physical energy on a 1-10 scale, (3) your mental energy on a 1-10 scale, (4) your emotional energy on a 1-10 scale, and (5) a one-word descriptor of your overall state (energized, neutral, drained, restless, focused, scattered). At the end of seven days, sort all entries by activity type and calculate the average energy change associated with each. Identify your top three energy generators and top three energy drains. Then compare these results to what you would have predicted before the audit — note any surprises.