How to Live a Productive Life

A great place to start is to remove those difficult decisions that are taking up our ‘mental bandwidth’. Many of us think that the big ‘limit’ on our ability to get things done is time. We all make the excuse that we don’t exercise because we don’t have time and that we don’t do more with the family because we don’t have time. That’s not true. If you think back to all of those times in your life when you’ve been doing ‘nothing’, then you’ll probably realize that you had plenty of time. Just this week, you’ve probably spent at least a good couple of hours on Facebook/YouTube/the website of your choice, and there’s a good chance you’ve watched a fair amount of useless TV as well. That’s all time that you could have been using to exercise, to phone friends, to tidy the house.

The point? You don’t have any problem with time. Your problem is with energy. The reason you’re not using that available time more efficiently, or even to have fun is that you’re low on energy. And did you know that your willpower decreases too as you run out of energy? Not only do you have less physical energy to get up and tidy when you’re tired, but you also have less mental willpower to encourage yourself to do it. Energy management then is much more important than time management very often. And a BIG component of energy management is understanding the impact that decision-making has on our energy levels.