Mental energy, not time
Posted: 2026-03-11
TL;DR: Often the bottleneck preventing us from having more impact is mental energy, not time.
The bottleneck is mental energy
At work, I hear people complain that they don’t have the time to solve all the problems they’d like to.
We work a given number of hours per day, but we rarely get to spend them doing intense deep focused work. Most of the time, the real bottleneck preventing us from having more impact is mental energy, not time 1.
Conserve your mental energy
Be zealous of your mental energy. There are many things you can do to avoid wasting it:
Avoid interruptions.
Set up your physical space appropriately.
Set up your virtual environment appropriately.
- Disable notification sounds on your phones.
Take meaningful breaks. Be mindful of your ultradian rhythms.
Prioritize sleep.
Different types of work
Be mindful of the different types of work you do.
Maximize time spent on deep focus and minimize time spent on boring details. Be deliberate about what you do when your mental energy is depleted.
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Many people have written about this before. This is nothing new. But I see people say “time” when they really should say “mental energy” so often, that I figured I’d take the time to make it explicit.↩︎