I wrote a bestseller on time management. Then this happened

My third book, Time Wise, was all about (surprise, surprise) time management. It became an international bestseller. Translated into many different languages. I’ve also spent years teaching productivity to global corporations, entrepreneurs and government departments.

I am, by any objective measure, a master at it.

I time-block my diary to within an inch of its life. I deep work almost every morning as though it’s my religion. My to-do list has been through hundreds of iterations to find what works best for me. (Hundreds. No exaggeration.)

And yet, in 2024, even with all of these finely tuned systems, the progress I was so used to making had simply vanished. I was working hard, sticking to my own advice, and producing nowhere near what I knew I was capable of.

Maybe you’ve felt this. Your calendar is beautifully colour-coded. Your system is technically perfect. And yet you’re wondering why you don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere and are, in fact, falling further behind every day.

I need you to know something: you’re not failing at time management.

We have been sold a myth. That if we can just optimise our schedules, habit-stack our mornings and implement the right 12-step routine, we will finally feel on top of things. But energy doesn’t work that way. You cannot schedule your way out of exhaustion.

Think about your phone for a moment. Remember the last time the battery icon turned red and you ignored it? A couple of hours later, it switched into power-saving mode. The screen dimmed. Apps closed. It basically turned itself into a Nokia 3310. It was unable to perform at full capacity, no matter how beautifully you had organised your home screen and streamlined your notifications.

Your brain works exactly the same way.

When you’re chronically depleted, the email that should take five minutes to write requires 30 - plus three rewrites because your brain fog made you sound like you learnt English from a malfunctioning chatbot. The client proposal that normally takes half an hour becomes an epic seven-draft saga. And simply deciding what to have for lunch morphs into something that requires a major committee meeting in your head.

When your energy is depleted, your prefrontal cortex (the brain’s CEO) essentially goes on strike. No amount of colour-coding or time-blocking can override basic neuroscience.

The problem isn’t how you’re spending your time (as much as the productivity gurus would have you believe this is the case).

The problem lies in how you’re spending your energy.

Here’s what makes this particularly frustrating: the more depleted you are, the harder it is to see the depletion itself. You double down on the time management advice. You try harder. You stay later. Which exhausts you further, which makes everything slower, which makes you work even longer hours.

The good news is there’s a way out. But it requires understanding something most productivity content never mentions: you don’t have one energy account. You have three. And they work very differently.

Your physical energy (how alive or exhausted you feel in your body) is what most people think of when they think about being tired.

But your mental energy (the fuel your prefrontal cortex runs on for anything that requires focused thinking) is a completely separate account.

And your emotional energy - the resource burned through managing difficult personalities, suppressing your reactions, feeling responsible for the people around you - is the account most people don’t even recognise as energy at all.

When one runs dry, it affects all three. And when all three are depleted simultaneously, no productivity system on earth will save you.

Tell me in the comments: which of those three accounts feels most depleted for you right now? Physical, Mental, or Emotional?

(And don’t worry, I have solutions that I’ll be sharing with you over the next few weeks!)