I used to be proud of how many hours I worked in a day, and I mean genuinely proud, the kind of proud where you tell people at dinner how little sleep you got like it was a medal you earned in some war nobody else could see. I kept calendars color-coded down to fifteen-minute blocks, I read every productivity book I could find, and I squeezed tasks into every gap the way you pack a suitcase when you know the airline will charge you for a second bag. I was efficient. I was disciplined. I was also, if I'm being honest, running on fumes most of the time and wondering why the engine kept stalling.
The shift happened for me a few years ago when I picked up "The Power of Full Engagement" by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, two performance researchers who had spent decades working with world-class athletes before turning their attention to the rest of us.. the ones grinding through corporate life and entrepreneurship and caregiving without ever thinking about recovery the way a sprinter thinks about rest between intervals. Their thesis was simple enough to fit on a napkin but radical enough to rearrange my entire week: the fundamental currency of high performance is not time, it is ENERGY. You cannot make more hours. You can, with practice and awareness, make more energy available within the hours you already have.
I remember reading that and feeling something click, the way a bone sets back into place after being slightly off for years. Because, what I had been doing was treating every hour as equal — an hour at six in the morning had the same weight on my calendar as an hour at three in the afternoon — when anyone who has tried to do creative thinking after a heavy lunch knows that is simply not true. Not all hours are created equal, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you stop punishing yourself for being human.
Granted, this might sound like just another framework, another system from another book by another pair of experts telling you how to live. I thought that too, at first. But then I started applying it to my actual life — to running Golden Pines, our memory care homes in Southeast Michigan — and the difference was something I could feel in my body, not just read about in a chapter summary. Senior care is not a business where you can phone it in during low-energy hours. When a resident with dementia is frightened at sundown, or a family member calls you in tears because their father no longer recognizes them, the thing they need from you is not your time. They need your presence, your emotional weight, your ability to hold space for grief without flinching. That requires energy of a very specific kind, and if you've spent it all answering emails and sitting in meetings that could have been a text message, you have nothing left for the moments that actually matter.
And so I restructured. I stopped scheduling my hardest emotional work — family consultations, care plan reviews, the conversations where someone tells me about the person their mother used to be — for the tail end of the day when I'm depleted. I moved them to the morning, when I'm full, when I can bring all of myself to the table. I started protecting my recovery periods the way I used to protect my work blocks, which felt backwards at first, almost lazy. Taking a walk at two in the afternoon when there are things on the to-do list feels like trusting when you want to control. But Loehr and Schwartz call this strategic recovery, and they are right — you cannot sustain high output without it, any more than a muscle can keep contracting without ever releasing.
The physical dimension was the easiest to fix. Sleep more, eat better, move your body. I already knew those things. The emotional and spiritual dimensions were harder because they required me to ask questions I had been avoiding.. questions about why I chose this work, about what drives me on the days when the business side is brutal and the regulatory burden feels designed to break you and the margins are thin enough to make any rational person walk away. I kept coming back to the same answer, and it is going to sound corny, but I have learned that the corny things are usually the truest things, which is why we rush past them. I do this work because of Mama. Because I remember what it felt like to watch someone you love grow older and need more care than you knew how to give, and I remember the helplessness of wanting to be enough and not knowing if you were. Every resident at Golden Pines is someone's mama or papa, and the energy I bring to their care is, in some way I can't fully explain, the energy I wish I could have given to mine. That is not a business strategy. That is a reason to get out of bed.
In any case, I am not the master of this yet. I still catch myself stacking meetings back to back like I'm proving something to someone who isn't watching. I still have days where I ignore my own recovery and pay for it the next morning with a fog that no amount of coffee can cut through. But I am learning, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, that managing my energy is the REAL work — that the hours on the clock are just the container, and what I pour into them determines everything. I no longer want to be the man who worked the most hours. I want to be the man who brought the most of himself to the hours that counted, and who had enough left over at the end of the day to sit with the people he loves and actually be there, not just physically present but fully, deeply there. That is the only kind of productivity I care about anymore, and I am building my days around it, one morning at a time.
