Run an Energy Audit: Tracking What Drains You for One Week

What is an energy audit, and what does one week of tracking reveal?

Imagine you reach Friday night completely empty, yet when a friend asks what made the week so hard, you cannot quite say. You blame work, or that one awful meeting, or just being tired lately. Maybe it has felt like this for months, and you quietly wonder if this is simply who you are now.

The short answer: An energy audit is one week of rating your energy a few times a day, noting what you were doing and who you were with, then reading the seven days as data instead of trusting memory. Three or four entries a day, one number, a few words. What it shows is usually smaller and more fixable than you feared.

Think of a bank statement: you swear you spend nothing on takeaway, until you see the list. Memory squeezes a day down to its most intense moment and its ending, the distortion Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman identified in 1993 and called the peak-end rule. It also ignores how long things lasted, which the same pair called duration neglect. So one bruising meeting at four can repaint a steady Tuesday as a wreck. A log written at the time does not.

Seven days is the shortest window holding a full work cycle and a weekend, enough to show whether your lows follow the clock, the calendar, or particular people. The finding is rarely that your job exhausts you. It is that Wednesday afternoons do, or group time after six, while what you dreaded cost almost nothing.

Two unrelated traditions reached this same format.

In the late 1920s and 1930s the British statistician L. H. C. Tippett, working at the Shirley Institute on problems in the cotton industry, developed a snap-reading method: describe how a factory spent its hours by recording what was happening at scattered moments instead of timing everything. He published it in the Journal of the Textile Institute in 1935, and it became known as work sampling.

Decades later Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson built the Experience Sampling Method, paging people at intervals to ask what they were doing and how they felt. The first pager studies ran in Csikszentmihalyi's lab at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s, and the pair set out its validity and reliability in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 1987. It became a standard way to study how mood and attention move across a day.

Your audit is a home version of both, with you as researcher and subject. The catch: watching changes things. Some people's scores drift up during the audit week simply because attention is a mild intervention. Accept that cost, and compare days within the week rather than against an imagined normal.

Kahneman would not have called the log simply truer. His point was that the remembering self, not the experiencing self, decides what you do next. The audit takes the experiencing self's side on purpose, which makes it a good guide to what to change and a poor guide to what you will want.

What should you log in an energy audit, and how many times a day?

Keep this light enough that you still do it on your most tired day.

At each entry, log four things: the time, an energy score, one line on what you did in the previous half hour, and who you were with.

Four entries a day is the default: waking, late morning, mid-afternoon and bedtime. That catches the morning climb and afternoon dip without becoming a second job. Three works if four feels punishing. Two does not, because a morning and evening reading cannot tell a day that sagged at two from one that sagged at five.

Add optional columns only if you will fill them: hours slept the night before, caffeine and its timing, and movement longer than ten minutes. Sleep is the biggest confounder in any energy log, so record it even if you skip the rest. Write clock times, not just a total; seven hours ending at five in the morning and seven ending at eight give you very different Tuesdays.

Keep your day-one columns unchanged through day seven. Add one on Thursday and your last four days no longer compare with your first three.

The two hardest columns are the honest ones.

Who you were with gets skipped because it feels like keeping score on your relationships, yet a repeated name beside repeated low scores is hard to argue with.

The note gets skipped because writing feels like effort when your energy is lowest, which is exactly when it matters. Cap it at six words and it survives the week.

Keep judgment out of the entry. Write "call with M, 40 min", not "draining call with M", because a judgment baked into raw data can never be looked at fresh. You collect now and read on day eight.

And log on schedule even when nothing happened. Ordinary blank stretches are the baseline that makes the bad Thursday readable. Audits that record only eventful moments paint a week far worse than it was.

How do you score your energy so the numbers stay comparable across the week?

Your numbers only help if a 6 on Monday means the same as a 6 on Friday.

So use a fixed 1 to 10 scale with written anchors you define before day one, and never redefine them mid-week. In your own words, write what a 2, a 5 and an 8 feel like, and reread them before your first few entries until the scale feels automatic. A workable set:

1 to 2: barely functional, nothing beyond passive input.

3 to 4: dragging, able to do familiar work slowly.

5 to 6: ordinary, neither pulled down nor pushed along.

7 to 8: capable and clear, the state you would pick for hard work.

9 to 10: rare and slightly lifted, worth noticing because it is rare.

If ten points feel too fine, a five-point scale is easier to apply the same way twice. Consistency beats detail. Score the moment you are in, not the hours behind you, and score before looking at yesterday, since seeing a 4 nudges you to write another.

Consider two numbers. After a long walk you can be bodily tired and mentally bright; after four hours of video calls, the reverse. Two 1 to 10 columns cost about three extra seconds. Some add a third for emotional charge. Beyond three, the audit dies by Wednesday.

The other threat is drift. By day five a 4 has quietly become what a 5 meant on Monday, because a hard week moved your reference point. Rereading your anchors each morning is the cheap fix.

Anchored self-rating has a long history. The Swedish psychologist Gunnar Borg built his 6 to 20 scale of perceived exertion around this exact problem, attaching verbal descriptions from no exertion at all at 6 through somewhat hard at 13 to maximal exertion at 20, so athletes and cardiac patients would use it the same way each session. The odd range was deliberate: multiply a rating by ten and you get a rough heart rate for a healthy adult, so a 13 sits near 130 beats per minute. That match is approximate and shifts with age, fitness and medication, but it gave the scale an outside check.

Your audit has no such check. Nothing outside you confirms your 6, so your written anchors do all the work. They are your ruler; without them you are measuring with a rubber band.

What does a filled-in energy audit log actually look like?

Seeing a real page shows you how little you need to write.

Each entry is one line of about a dozen words: time, score, activity, company, short note. A Wednesday from a four-entry audit:

07:10, 5, woke before alarm, alone, slept six hours.

11:30, 7, drafting the budget, alone, best stretch so far.

15:00, 3, back-to-back calls since one, four colleagues, could not follow the last one.

22:15, 4, television, partner, never recovered after three.

Already a shape: a strong late morning, a hard fall after one, no evening recovery. The Saturday from the same log:

09:40, 6, slow start, alone, slept eight hours.

12:30, 8, long walk, alone, best score of the week.

16:00, 6, shopping, partner, fine.

22:00, 5, late dinner with friends, six people, wanted to leave by nine.

Saturday shows the same person reaching an 8. So Wednesday's 3 was about the situation, not a fixed ceiling on who you are. Keep the format identical daily so you can read the week down a column.

Failed logs fail in ways you can spot.

The bedtime fill. Four entries in one burst at eleven at night, suspiciously smooth, all within a point of each other. Real logs are jagged.

The essay. Notes grow into paragraphs by day two, and the audit is dropped by day four.

The missing weekend. It removes the only comparison showing your energy without a calendar around it.

The interpreted entry. "Draining meeting" instead of "planning meeting, 5 people". If you already know it was draining, you skipped the audit and went straight to the conclusion you walked in with.

Gaps are not failures; a missed entry marked missed beats one invented later. Aim to fill at least twenty-four of the twenty-eight entries in a four-a-day week. Far below that, you find patterns in when you remembered, not in the week. Researchers hit the same wall: a 2019 review of response rates across experience sampling studies found compliance averaging around three-quarters of prompts, slipping further as the days went on. Miss a few and you are in good company.

How do you read the log once the seven days are over?

On day eight you finally see your week from above, like looking at a map after days of walking the streets. Wait until all seven days are in, then read in four passes.

First, draw the curve. Days along the bottom, scores up the side, points joined. A shape appears in seconds that rows never show you, usually a repeating daily arc plus one or two days that break it.

Second, rank. List every entry from highest to lowest. Read the top five and bottom five together and ignore the middle; in data this small, the extremes carry most of the signal.

Third, cluster. Note what your bottom five share, and your top five, by time of day, activity and who was there. Look for a repeated element, not one dramatic one.

Fourth, name candidates. Write at most three suspected drains and three suspected restorers as plain sentences with evidence. For example: group calls longer than forty minutes appear in four of my five lowest entries.

Three of each is the ceiling. A list of eleven is a list you will never act on.

Two distinctions save you from the obvious mistakes.

Level versus change. A 4 at nine in the evening on a day that started at 7 tells a different story from a 4 flat since morning. Read the drop between back-to-back entries as its own number; most drains show up as a drop, not a level.

Time of day versus content. Almost everyone has a mid-afternoon trough that arrives whatever is happening, and the meeting inside it takes the blame. Check whether your lows cluster by clock time across all seven days, weekend included. If so, it is a body-clock pattern, and the levers are physical: light, sleep timing, and when your last caffeine landed. Caffeine has a half-life of roughly five hours in most healthy adults, with wide individual variation, so a three o'clock coffee is still half present at eight.

The post-lunch dip is the classic case. Sleep researchers, Timothy Monk among them, report it appears in people who ate no lunch and cannot see a clock. That points at body timing, not the meal, so your two o'clock meeting may sit inside a trough it did not cause.

If your lows cluster by activity instead, and the same hours are fine on Saturday, the cause is in your week, not your body.

How do you tell a real drain from something you only assume drains you?

You probably carry a list of things you are sure drain you. Here you check it, gently, against the evidence.

A real drain shows up in your log on days you were not expecting it. An assumed drain shows up only in how you describe the week.

Before reading the data, write down the three things you believe drain you most. Then count how many of your lowest scores contain each one, and how many times each appeared without a low score following. That second number dissolves most assumptions. If the commute you have complained about for two years appears eight times and sits beside a low score twice, it is not the drain to tackle first.

Three traps cause most false alarms:

Anticipation. The dread costs more than the task, and the dip shows up an hour early.

Attribution. A low afternoon gets pinned on its most memorable event, not its actual cause.

Contamination. An activity always sits next to the real culprit and inherits its blame, which is why your company column matters as much as your activity column.

The audit's best gift is the drain nobody suspected: low scores beside notes like admin, or nothing much. Undramatic activity is underrated because it leaves no story behind. Task switching, unfinished decisions carried all day, and rooms with bad light do not feel like events, yet they show in the numbers. It is like a slow leak in a tyre: no bang, just a car that keeps feeling heavier.

If one person's name keeps appearing beside your lowest entries across several days and settings, that finding needs care. First ask whether it holds when the setting changes, since one difficult context can look like one difficult person. Sort those entries by whether you chose to be there. A name that costs you two points in an assigned meeting and nothing over lunch is telling you about the meeting. Two points in both is telling you about the person.

The audit's job stops at naming the pattern. Deciding what a repeated name means is separate, slower work. Be kind to yourself while you do it.

What restores your energy, and how does the log prove it?

Here is the hopeful part: the log that finds your drains also shows what fills you back up.

Restorers are activities followed by a measurable rise in your score, proven by pairing the entry before with the entry after. Something you enjoy is not automatically a restorer, and some genuinely restorative things feel mildly unpleasant to start. Anything that reliably adds two points on three or more occasions is a real restorer for you. Anything that leaves the score flat is neutral, however good its reputation.

Good candidates are short and cheap:

- ten minutes outdoors in daylight - a nap under twenty-five minutes - a conversation with one specific person - a hot shower - food after a long gap - silence with no input at all

Test them one at a time, logging right before and about thirty minutes after. Grounding and Earthing: Techniques, Claims and What Research Says covers one candidate in detail, including where its evidence is thin; the honest approach is to treat it as a hypothesis for your own log, not a settled fact. Scrolling often fails this test.

A pause stops the drain; a restorer moves the number up. Think of a phone: standby is not the same as plugging it in. Lying on the sofa with your phone usually registers as a pause. Ten minutes walking outdoors often registers as a real climb. Neither is universal, which is why you measure your own.

Watch timing too. Some restorers work within minutes; some need an hour to show. Logged only right afterward, a slow one looks like a failure.

Naps flip the problem. Sleep researchers put the usual onset of slow-wave sleep around the half-hour mark, which is why naps under about thirty minutes are generally recommended for avoiding grogginess. Wake from deeper sleep and you get sleep inertia: your score ten minutes later can land below the one that sent you to lie down, then climb above it an hour on. Log both before deciding naps do not work for you.

The audit answers the slower question: across seven days, what moved your scores, and at what cost in time?

What do you change first once the audit is finished?

You have a week of data and maybe an urge to fix everything at once. Please resist it.

Change one thing from your three suspected drains: the one with the best ratio of energy recovered to social cost. That second half is what stops audits ending in a plan nobody carries out. Try four changes at once and the result is unreadable and usually collapses within a fortnight. One change, held two weeks, logged the same way, gives an answer you can trust.

Rank your candidates two ways: how much energy each costs, and how hard the change would be without a conversation you dread. The most expensive drain is often the hardest to move, and starting there leaves you stalled and feeling the week was wasted. Start with the biggest drain you can change alone. First changes that need no negotiation:

- move demanding work into the two-hour window where your scores peak - add a ten-minute recovery gap after whatever reliably costs you two points - cut one recurring commitment that sat beside low scores and gave you nothing you value - end your working day at a fixed time

Filling freed time is a prioritizing problem. The urgent-versus-important sort and weekly planning session in Stephen Covey: Key Ideas, Methods and How to Apply Them handle it better than any energy log.

Name the replacement before you remove the drain. The quiet trap: the audit works, the drain goes, and within a month your calendar has refilled the gap with something nobody measured, because you had stopped logging. Empty time is like an empty shelf; something always ends up on it.

Then set your repeat. An audit is a periodic check, not a permanent habit, and running it nonstop makes it a chore. Repeat after any change worth checking, after a job or household change, and otherwise roughly quarterly. Keep the same anchors and scale, or the weeks cannot be compared.

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