Conserving mental energy

Making choices and juggling things in your brain takes mental energy. Making choices can make you physically exhausted (“Why you’re so tired” by Johnny Harris) and resisting something leads to 🧠 Ego Depletion.

To conserve more mental energy, avoid making choices all day and get things out of your brain and into an external system. It is a typical example of the advice to note things down when you are feeling overwhelmed. This removes the need to keep all of it in mind, which leads to exhaustion. The longer I think about it, the more I think this is a major cause of burnout.

So, some concrete examples:

  • Note down everything you have to do in a list
    • Regularly clean up this list, some things aren’t relevant anymore after some time
  • Be honest with yourself about things you won’t realistically get to
    • Prevent the list of things you want to do from growing indefinitely, as this will be another drain of mental energy
  • Have a pre-defined structure for the day
    • Instead of checking Slack or Mail randomly, have a specific time in the day when you check it
  • Give everything a priority and stick to that priority
    • This removes the need to constantly decide what to do next

Having all this structure might give the impression you would be living life like a machine, going from top to bottom of a list without thinking. The whole idea is to apply this to the things that are not meaningful in life to make sure you still have the mental energy for things that are important and meaningful to you.

Negative factors

  • Phone or Slack (at work)
  • Frustration and stress
  • Lack of control
  • Being overwhelmed
    • Most things aren’t urgent so there’s no need for them to stress me out
    • I spend more mental energy thinking about it than it would take me to do it

Deep Work

Book by Cal Newport about the importance of deep focused work and how to achieve it.