Managing Energy, Not Just Time: A Leadership Reality
You Are Not The Same Person You Were Eight Hours Ago I once missed a critical concession during a high-stakes regulatory negotiation at 4:15pm. A concession I would have caught in seconds at 9am. Not because the issue was buried in the documentation. Not because the counterparty had been particularly clever about it. Because I was not the same person I had been when I sat down that morning, and I had convinced myself otherwise. That cost six weeks of rework. Six weeks of calls, revised positions, internal re-briefings, and the particular exhaustion that comes not from hard work but from correctable mistakes. The kind that follows you home. What I remember most clearly is not the moment I spotted the error – that came later, in the debrief. What I remember is the certainty I felt getting on that call. Tired, yes. But experienced. Seasoned. Twenty years in the room for situations exactly like this. I had done harder things on less sleep. I would be fine. I was not fine. The Situation This was 2021. I was in a regulatory settlement negotiation – the kind where the stakes are measured not just in money but in precedent, in relationship, in what I would have to explain to a board that trusted my judgment. The counterparty’s team had pushed for a late afternoon slot. I knew this was not an accident when it happens in negotiations. Scheduling is a tactic. I knew that. I agreed anyway. By the time the call started, I had already been in five hours of prior meetings. The morning had been sharp – I had gone into an early session and caught two inconsistencies in the counterparty’s position before the first coffee had gone cold. That version of me was good. That version of me was not on the 4:15pm call. The concession slipped through in the language of an indemnity clause, framed as a minor administrative provision. In the context of the full document, in the state I was in, it read like standard boilerplate. At full capacity, the phrasing would have stopped me cold. Instead, I moved on. We concluded the call. I noted it as a productive session. This was not a productive session. The error surfaced forty-eight hours later during a legal review. What followed was not a crisis – we recovered, we corrected, we rebuilt the position. But the cost was real. Six weeks. And the harder cost: I had to sit with the knowledge that I had known, at some level, that I was not sharp enough for that call. I had chosen to get on it anyway, because the alternative felt like an admission I was not ready to make. What I Got Wrong – And Had Been Getting Wrong For Twenty Years The first thing I got wrong was the assumption that experience is a substitute for condition. For most of my career I had treated my own cognitive state as essentially stable. Adjustable by caffeine, by willpower, by the professional obligation to perform. My logic ran something like: I have navigated complex situations before, therefore I can navigate this one now, regardless of timing. This logic is seductive and it is false. Experience sharpens my tools. It does not mean I am holding them the same way at 4pm as I was at 9am. Neuroscience has been clear on this for decades – decision quality, working memory, and the ability to detect subtle inconsistencies all degrade across the day for most people, particularly after sustained cognitive load. Knowing this intellectually and actually scheduling around it are two entirely different things. The second thing I got wrong was conflating busyness with prioritisation. For years I had scheduled my hardest thinking into whatever slot remained after everything else was placed. Board preparation at 6pm. Critical document reviews at end of day. Strategic planning sessions wedged between operational calls. My reasoning was efficient: get the administrative and relational work done first, then tackle the substantive. In practice, I had it entirely backwards. I was giving the work that required the least of me my best hours, and giving the work that required everything I had the hours when I had nothing left. My calendar looked productive. My output suffered in ways I had not tracked carefully enough to notice the pattern. The third thing I got wrong was making this a personal failing rather than a structural one. After 2021, I did not immediately change how I operated. What I did first – and I say this without pride – was file the mistake under “lessons learned” and quietly resolve to be more careful next time. As if vigilance was the missing ingredient. What I actually needed was a different architecture. The sharpest executives I have worked alongside do not rely on willpower to protect their cognitive peak. They protect it structurally. They decline late afternoon calls for high-stakes decisions. They build buffers before complex work. They are, in this specific sense, harder to schedule than their less experienced peers – and that difficulty is not arrogance. It is professionalism. I have written before about the conditions under which teams perform at their genuine best – and the same principle applies at the individual level. The environment and the timing are not irrelevant context. They are part of the result. What This Means In Practice This is not an argument for becoming precious about my calendar. Most senior roles do not afford the luxury of perfect scheduling, and the executives who refuse any meeting after noon are usually protecting mediocrity more than sharpness. But there is a meaningful difference between unavoidable scheduling constraints and the habit of treating my cognitive peak as a flexible resource I can deploy wherever the day demands. The question worth asking is a simple one: do I know which hour of my day I am genuinely dangerous – the hour when my pattern recognition is fastest, my judgment is cleanest, my read