Over time, and individually and through my leadership practices, I've come through many conversations talking about these things called Givers and Takers.

It's a simple way of cataloging time, and discovering how your daily—weekly, monthly, yearly—energy is invested. It's also a way of reflecting on the oscillating ebb & flow of that same energy; how it moves through you, when, and why.

An unscientific graph

This is a four quadrant graph axis with time as the x-axis, horizontal, and energy as the y-axis, vertical.

For every wave's crest, there's an equally deep trough—if something takes a lot of energy, it takes double that amount of time to recover sustainably. The goal is to shorten the distance between oscillations, moving towards strong stability with adequate rest based on energy over time.

In the disability community, we call this sort of thing Spoon Theory. It's basically, you have so many spoons in the day for basic functions. The goal isn't to use every spoon—that's when undesired outcomes occur. The point is to use as many spoons through the day that doesn't break into tomorrow's energy...while acknowledging how many spoons you have in the day.

If it's a pain day, you'll have fewer spoons to work with and need to invest energy differently.
If it's a bad brain day, rest and sleep will be a far better investment than slogging through..actively working against your brain.
If it's a distraction-feeling day—one where you know you'll be easily distracted—adjust your energy use to the types of tasks that don't take from that energy, but is reciprocal, use it as a giver and inertia bringer to the day.

Givers and Takers

Givers are actions, tasks, or events that feed your energy, like stoking a fire. Takers are actions, tasks, or events that drain you—can be a slow, dripping faucet or a full on destruction of a dam.

For one week:

• take time to notice the things you're doing, by writing them down on "paper"
• at the end of each day, mark them as a giver or taker. A simple, binary rating is best. Journal, too, if that's your thing.
• after a week, sit down and reflect on the givers and takers.

Look for patterns and ask questions:

• which did I have more of?
• were some days more heavily one thing or the other?
• what sort of tasks were givers? Any commonalities?
• what sort of things were takers? Any categorical differences?
• when did I feel the most energized?
• why? to each.

Motivational Inertia

The goal is to energize your investments, put it into context of ebbs and flows, and allow you some "hard facts" about the energy itself.

It's not a practice of fixing everything. That won't work. It's not an exercise of soluting. It's work of internal reflection.

You're always going to have to do things that take energy. That's how energy balances itself—just like in magic, everything comes at a cost. Acknowledging that, you can plan our your tasks to build up to motivational inertia, that give energy.