How I Got My Time (and Energy) Back:
8 Strategies That Actually Work

Personal Growth | Leadership

June 2, 2026 • 10 min read

Quick Answer:

A few posts ago, I made the case that what most of us call a time problem is actually an energy problem in disguise. This week, I'm going to prove it with my own story. When I volunteered to babysit my granddaughter every Tuesday for three months, I didn't know if I could make it work. It forced me to get disciplined about how I structured my days, and what I discovered surprised me: I didn't need more time. I needed to be more intentional about how I spent the time I had. In this post, you'll get eight practical strategies for reclaiming your time and energy, plus the personal shifts that made the biggest difference for me.

The Experiment That Changed How I Think About Time

In one of my posts last month, I talked about the difference between a time problem and an energy problem and shared some practical DiSC tools that can give you hours back each week. I also shared my own motivators and stressors from Catalyst and challenged you to look at yours.

This week, I want to get more personal. Because the strategies I'm about to share didn't come from a book or a productivity course. They came from volunteering to babysit my granddaughter.

Here's what happened. My daughter-in-law, a teacher, returned to work this spring to finish out the school year. To avoid daycare for those few short months, she recruited babysitters. I raised my hand for Tuesdays.

The moment I committed, a wave of panic hit. Tuesdays are often one of my fullest days: client meetings, workshops, coaching calls. How was I going to hold a baby and run a business at the same time?

But something interesting happened when I was forced to work within a constraint. I got really intentional about how I scheduled my time. I stopped treating my calendar like a suggestion and started treating it like a strategy. I blocked, batched, delegated, and said no (or at least not yet) to things I would have previously said yes to out of habit.

And it worked. I had an absolute ball with our little bundle of joy. Some of you may have even caught a glimpse of her on a Zoom call, because it was pretty tough to avoid the occasional cameo. But for the most part, it worked beautifully, and I'm emerging from those months more productive, not less, because the challenge forced me to be honest about what actually mattered.

Start Where We Left Off: Motivators and Stressors

Before we get to the seven strategies, I want to pick up where we left off last month. I shared the energy booster exercise from Catalyst: go to your What Drives You section and look at your motivators and stressors. I promised I'd show you how I manage my stressors intentionally to keep them from draining me.

Here's what I mean. These are some of my biggest stressors and how I've structured my life to minimize their impact:

Stressor: Having little independence or private time.
Solution: For over a year, I've scheduled exercise on my calendar three early mornings each week. That time is non-negotiable. It's mine before anyone else gets a piece of me, and it fills my tank and lowers my natural intensity before the day even starts.

Stressor: Following inefficient procedures.
Solution: Our office is obsessed with process, systems, and quality. That's not an accident. It's by design, because I hate wasting time. If something feels clunky, we fix it. We don't tolerate workarounds when a better system exists.

Stressor: Dealing with people who don't meet my standards.
Solution: I'm blessed to have fabulous clients and followers like you who share my appreciation for people and my personal values. I've also eliminated toxic relationships from my life. Those were some of the hardest yet energy-giving decisions I've ever made.

Stressor: Moderating my quick pace and working methodically toward long-term goals.
Solution: I meet weekly with two accountability groups to stay focused on what's important and to keep my priorities from drifting. Left to my own devices, I'd constantly be coming up with new initiatives or sprinting through everything and burn out. The accountability keeps me moving at a pace that's sustainable.

Your stressors will be different from mine, and that's the point. The exercise isn't about copying my solutions. It's about being honest with yourself about what drains you and then making intentional choices to reduce those drains. Sometimes you can eliminate a stressor entirely. Sometimes you can automate it, delegate it, or restructure your day so it takes up less of your peak energy. Whatever the solution is for you, get started today!

Now, let's get into the eight simple strategies to build and focus your energy, while finding more time in your days.

8 Time Strategies That Actually Work

1. Decide Before You Do

Don't mistake activity for results. It's easy to feel productive when you're busy, but busy and effective are not the same thing.

Practice a Monday Reset each week. Ask yourself: "What must be true by the end of this week?" Not what do I need to do, but what must be true. The difference matters because it forces you to think in terms of outcomes, not tasks.

Here are some examples of what "true by Friday" might look like: a team member has clarity and confidence they didn't have on Monday. Stakeholders agree on the direction, even though the details haven't been worked out. The team feels supported after a tough situation last week. I am not the bottleneck for this decision.

Compare those to what most of us default to: finish emails, attend meetings, put out fires, get through the week. The first list creates momentum. The second list just creates exhaustion.

2. Limit Work in Progress

Fewer priorities equal faster progress because when everything is a priority, nothing is.

A good rule of thumb: no more than three to five active priorities at a time. Everything else is either scheduled for later, delegated to someone else, or parked until capacity opens up. This feels uncomfortable at first, especially for high achievers who pride themselves on doing it all. But the math is simple. Spreading your energy across ten things means none of them get your best.

3. Protect Your High-Impact Time

This is where the energy conversation becomes very practical. Not all hours are created equal. You have high-energy hours and low-energy hours, and the work you assign to each should match.

High-energy hours are for planning, coaching, problem solving, and creative thinking. Low-energy hours are for admin, email, and routine tasks. Most people do this backwards, spending their sharpest hours in their inbox and then trying to do strategic work when they're running on fumes.

Block one to two protected windows per week for thinking, planning, or people leadership. Even 60 minutes of protected, high-energy time can change the trajectory of your week.

4. Your Calendar Is Your Strategy

To-do lists are aspirational. If something matters, it must live on your calendar.

Ask yourself: does your calendar reflect your ideal day, or does it reflect everyone else's urgency? If your calendar is full of other people's meetings and requests, you're executing someone else's priorities, not your own. Then, you end up working on your to-do's at night, on weekends, or not at all.

Here's a practical shift. First, block time for leadership work like check-ins, coaching, strategic projects, and planning. Then take your to-do list and assign each item to a specific time slot on your calendar - like scheduling a meeting with yourself to do the tasks. If it doesn't have a home on the calendar, it doesn't have commitment behind it.

5. Build Margins on Purpose

Calendar white space is not wasted time. It's an intentional planning tool. The unexpected will happen, and if your calendar has zero breathing room, every surprise becomes a crisis.

Build in 10 to 15 minutes between meetings so you can decompress, process, and show up present for the next conversation. Schedule one "light" day per week if possible. Add buffer time before and after emotionally heavy work like difficult conversations, employee relations issues, or performance discussions. And build in contingency time for the things you know will come up but can't predict.

Margins help you respond instead of react, stay emotionally present, and make better decisions under pressure.

6. Delegate Using EDGE

Your time multiplies as your team grows, but only if you delegate well. Poor delegation actually costs you time because you end up redoing work or micromanaging.

Use the EDGE method:

Explain the why and the expectations. People do better work when they understand the purpose, not just the task.

Demonstrate what good looks like. Don't assume people know your standards. Show them.

Guide with feedback, recognition, and checkpoints along the way. Delegation isn't a handoff and disappear. It's a supported transfer.

Empower with trust and autonomy. Once someone has proven they can deliver, get out of the way and let them own it.

7. Work in Focused Sprints

If you struggle with focus or find yourself bouncing between tasks without finishing any of them, try the Pomodoro Technique. It's named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that its creator, Francesco Cirillo, used as a university student in Italy, and it's beautifully simple.

Set a timer for 25 minutes. During those 25 minutes, work on one thing and one thing only. No email, no Slack, no quick peeks at your phone. When the timer goes off, take a five-minute break. Walk around, refill your coffee, look out the window. Then start another 25-minute sprint.

It sounds almost too simple to work, but it does, for two reasons. First, 25 minutes feels manageable even when a task feels overwhelming. You're not committing to finishing the whole thing. You're just committing to 25 minutes of focused attention. Second, the built-in breaks prevent the kind of mental fatigue that makes everything take longer. You're essentially building margins (tip #5) right into your workflow.

I use this technique when I'm writing, building client proposals, tackling anything that requires deep thinking, and even decluttering my kitchen counters and cleaning the bathrooms. Four Pomodoro sprints with breaks in between gives you nearly two hours of genuinely focused work, and you'll be amazed at how much more you accomplish compared to two hours of scattered multitasking.

8. Choose Priorities and Replace Guilt with Intentional Choices

This is the hardest one and yet, the most important. Every "yes" is a "not now" to something else. That's not failure. It's math.

Here's an exercise I use myself and with my own coaching clients. Rank these areas of your life in order of priority from 1 to 10, and no ties allowed:

Career/Work, Finances, Health/Energy, Family, Relationships, Personal Growth/Learning, Spirituality/Faith, Fun/Recreation/Hobbies, Community/Service, Environment/Home.

What are your top 3 priorities? Realistically, you don't have time for the others, at this point in your life. And, that's okay. You have plenty of time ahead of you!

Now look at those top 3. How can you intentionally prioritize those 3 things more fully in your life right now? What can you intentionally deprioritize? The word "intentionally" is doing all the heavy lifting in that sentence, because there's a big difference between deprioritizing something on purpose and neglecting it out of guilt or avoidance. Get comfortable saying, "this just isn't a priority for me at this point in my life." Then, love your priorities even more fully.

When I volunteered for Tuesdays with our bundle of joy, I was intentionally prioritizing family. That meant intentionally deprioritizing some client availability on that day. I didn't feel guilty about it because it was a conscious choice, not an accident. Remove guilt. Replace it with intentional choices.

It's About Energy, Not Hours

Every strategy on this list comes back to the same idea: when you're intentional about where your energy goes, time takes care of itself. You stop spending your best hours on things that drain you. You stop saying yes to everything out of obligation. You start protecting the time and activities that fill your tank, and you build systems so the rest doesn't fall apart.

I didn't find more hours in the day when I started babysitting on Tuesdays. I found more energy by being honest about what mattered, what didn't, and what I could let go of without the world ending.

You can do the same thing. Start small. Pick one strategy from this list and try it this week. Just one. Small actions create momentum, and momentum creates energy.

What's Next

This is the second in a three-part series on reclaiming your time and energy. In my post: How Can I Use DiSC to Re-Energize a Team Mid-Year, I shift the focus to your teams. You'll see how: how to give them a simple, efficient mid-year energizer to help them push through the second half of the year with renewed focus and connection.