Title For Today

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Today, I will break down another exercise that has helped me preserve my time and energy while recovering from Long Covid.

One of the most difficult things can be finding the energy and time to put towards your recovery, amongst the chaos of everyday life.

Maybe it’s the kids, maybe it’s work, cooking, cleaning.

There are plenty of things that need to be done, and so little energy to do it.

But getting an overview of what gives you energy, vs. what takes it, can radically improve your quality of life.

Today’s exercise will let you:

Identify all the tasks that bring & take your energy
Figure out where you can delegate or drop tasks
Give you the space to focus on what matters

Let’s dive in!

The time energy audit.

I first came across the time energy audit on Matt Grey's channel, a business owner who runs a super lean, low stress business empire.

The whole premise of this exercise is as follows:

1. List out every business task you do in a day to day

2. Determined whether it gives or drains your energy, or is somewhat neutral

3. Decide whether to delegate, eliminate or automate the draining tasks

The whole idea is to free up your time, so you can spend less time in the weeds of the business, less time working IN the business, and more time working ON the business.

Now you might be getting fed up of me converting business systems into tools to recovery (my apologies!), but again this is something that I have found so incredibly useful for recovery.

So often we spend time doing things, without knowing, that are totally draining our energy, hindering our recovery, and generally making our lives miserable. We don’t realise it, and very often these are in fact things that could be automated or simply removed.

The ‘recovery’ version of this exercise is really quite simple.

1. List out your daily tasks

2. Determine if they give or drain your energy

3. Decide which you could automate, eliminate or delegate

For example, you can see mine above.

Things like reading and writing, actually bring me a lot of energy, so I keep them in - I don’t need to touch them.

But things like answering my private enquiries for work, I found incredibly draining.

This wasn’t something I could eliminate, so I set up an automation so the responses would be sent without me lifting a finger.

Same goes for customer enquiries - this drains my energy, so I delegated to someone else.

And phone scrolling - something I want to eliminate entirely.

Now, maybe your time energy audit won’t include work based stuff, or maybe it will.

The point is to list out every single thing that you do, and really evaluate where some changes could be made to support yourself.

Maybe shopping could be ordered on a recurring basis? Maybe your partner or family member could pick up the kids a few times a week? Maybe there’s some energy vampire habits you could remove completely?

This will of course be highly personal, but I’ve given some examples below.

Again, this is another relatively simple exercise, but I am a really big believer in the small things. So I will leave you with steps to get started if you want to give this a go:

Access the time-energy audit template here
List out all your daily activities
Rate each activity's effect on your energy levels
See where you can automate, delegate or eliminate!

This is not a magic fix or cure, but making small changes to my life like this has been so integral in freeing up my time and energy to be spent either on recovery or joyful based activities.

I am in no way shielded from the fact that finding the time and energy for yourself must be beyond difficult if you are on the severe side of the spectrum. Or if you have to deal not only with recovery but the kids bedtime.

If you’re juggling all these things + recovery then I truly salute you.

But I hope this exercise can throw up at least a couple of those ‘energy vampires’ in your life. Those things that can be automated, delegated or removed entirely. To give you more time and energy to focus on yourselves, and doing the things that bring you joy.

See you next week!