Method
How to run an energy audit.
An energy audit works out which parts of your work give you energy and which take it away, using time you have already tracked. It takes about half an hour to do and it usually changes what somebody works on the following week.
The method is Matt Mochary's. What follows is how we run it.
Pick a window, and make it at least two weeks
Two weeks is the minimum that shows a shape. A month is better, because it catches the things that only happen at month end. Any shorter and you are looking at one unusual week.
Go through every entry and mark it green or red
Green means the work gave you energy. Red means it took energy away. Mark how the work felt, not how well it went or how important it was. A task can be valuable and still be red.
Look at the split, and expect it to be bad
Most people come out around 80% red the first time they do this. That is normal and it is the point. What you are aiming for is roughly the reverse: about 80% of your time in green.
Work through the red, one entry at a time
There are three moves and only three. Delegate it to somebody who will not find it draining. Stop doing it, because a surprising amount of red work turns out not to be worth doing. Or put constraints on it: batch it, cap it, or fix when in the week it happens.
Look for the swap
The cheapest win in the whole exercise is work that drains one person and is genuinely enjoyed by somebody else on the team. It comes up almost every time, and moving it costs nothing.
Running it with a team
We run it through one-on-ones. Before the meeting, ask the person to go back over their last two weeks and mark each entry green or red. Then spend the one-on-one on the pattern rather than the individual entries: what kind of work keeps coming up green, what keeps coming up red, and which of the three moves applies.
Two things surface nearly every time. Work that should belong to somebody else on the team, and work that nobody should be doing at all. Both are easy to act on once they are written down, and almost impossible to see otherwise.
It is worth saying plainly what tends to be red: administrative work that does not feel like it matters. People who are good at their job rarely enjoy it. The same people usually enjoy the work that obviously matters, even when it is hard. The audit makes that difference visible instead of leaving it as a mood.
That is most of the craft of running a team: getting the right people onto the right things. The audit turns it from a guess into something you can point at.
Coming soon in RealTime
Today you can run this against a calendar or a spreadsheet. We are building it into RealTime so the marking happens on entries you have already tracked: one click per entry, then the same reports you already have, split by energy. Over time that becomes a record of what a person actually likes doing, which is the part no one currently keeps.
It is not in the product yet. Everything else on the homepage is.
Last two weeks
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How the marking would look on a fortnight of tracked entries.