Energy Audit

A personal energy audit is a list of what fills your week, with each item rated by how it leaves you: drained, neutral or charged, and how often it happens. Adding those up shows where your energy goes and where it comes from. The point is not the total but the swap: a little less of your worst drainers, a little more of your best chargers, on purpose.

• Pick what is part of a normal week. The list covers people, tasks, places and habits, and you can add your own in each area.
• Rate each one from drains a lot to charges a lot, and say how often it happens.
• Read your battery map: chargers on the right, drainers on the left, longest bars first.
• Choose what to do with your top three drainers and put your top three chargers on days of the week.

Each item counts how strongly it drains or charges you (1 or 2) times how many times a week it happens. Something that drains you a little every day ends up costing more than a big drain once a month, which is exactly the kind of thing people miss when they guess. Charge is the total of everything that lifts you, drain the total of everything that costs you, and the net weekly balance is the difference. The battery shows the share that charges you on a 0 to 10 scale, where 5 is even.

A drainer rarely has to go completely. There are three moves, and the audit suggests one for each drainer that you can change:

• Cut: stop it or say no to it, like screens in bed or a standing commitment you dread.
• Shrink: keep it, but shorter, smaller or less often, like a family visit with a clear end time.
• Batch: group it into set slots, like email checked three times a day instead of all day.

Chargers work the other way. The ones that charge you most but happen least often are the best place to start, because one more walk, call or hour of a hobby a week makes a visible difference. The swap plan puts them on days, and you can copy it into your notes.

Here is how a swap adds up. Say meetings drain you a bit and happen every day: minus 7 a week. A walk with a friend charges you a lot but happens about twice a month: plus 1. Batch the meetings into a few days and the drain drops to minus 3. Make the walk weekly and it rises to plus 2. Two small changes, and the week swings by 5 in your favor, without quitting anything.

Work psychology has a simple model for this. In the Job Demands-Resources model, demands are the parts of work that cost sustained effort, and resources are the parts that help you get it done and grow, like support, control and feedback (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007, Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328). The audit applies the same idea to your whole week. Stevan Hobfoll's conservation of resources theory adds why drain feels so heavy: people try to keep, protect and build what they value, and what stresses them is losing it or the threat of losing it (Hobfoll, 1989, American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524).

Mental fatigue fits the same picture. Maarten Boksem and Mattie Tops proposed that the brain keeps weighing the expected reward of a task against its energy cost, and that people stop wanting to continue when the cost seems to outweigh the reward (Boksem and Tops, 2008, Brain Research Reviews, 59(1), 125–139). That is why the same hour can feel light when it matters to you and exhausting when it does not.

On the charging side, Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz separated four ways people recover from work in their free time: switching off mentally, relaxing, a challenge they get better at, and choosing for themselves what to do (Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221). A strong list of chargers usually has some of each.

This is a self-check for reflection. It maps what you notice; it does not measure your body's energy, and the ranges for running down, about even and charging up are a plain reading guide, not norms. If you are tired most days whatever you change, and rest does not refill you, see your doctor. Poor sleep, illness and low mood can all show up as constant tiredness.

Save the audit and re-check in a month: the next audit starts from the same list, and the page shows what moved. If people are your biggest drain, your social battery and the introvert or extrovert quiz explain why. If nothing seems to refill you, find out what kind of rest you need, or build a dopamine menu of small things that lift you. When work is the drain that never lets up, the burnout test looks deeper, and the stress level test shows what has been weighing on you in the last two weeks. For invisible work at home, try the mental load test, and for the bigger picture, the wheel of life.