Diagnostic
Energy Audit
Colour two weeks of your calendar green, amber or red by how each block left your energy — the fastest way to see what your week actually costs you, and what funds you.
Reach for this when you end weeks depleted but can't name why, or when the calendar looks perfectly reasonable and you still dread Monday. It's two passes over the same two weeks: the energy pass asks whether your calendar matches your battery; the role pass asks whether it matches your job.
How to run it
Take two weeks of calendar
Print it or screenshot it — something you can mark up. One week works in a pinch; two weeks smooths out the anomalies.
Colour every block as you exit it
Green: energy up. Red: energy down. Amber: neutral. Judge on the way out, not in the moment — a hard workout or a tough coaching conversation can drain you during and pay you back after. What matters is the net effect.
Read the patterns
What share of the week is red? When do the greens happen — mornings, after exercise, with certain people? Which meeting types are reliably red no matter the topic?
“"Deep work before lunch is always green; any meeting before 11am turns the whole morning red" is a finding you can act on this week.”
Act on the reds
Three options per red block: cut it, delegate it, or redesign it — change your role in the meeting, batch the admin, move it out of your peak hours. Protect the greens first; they are what the reds spend.
Write the findings into your Personal Manual
The audit is a snapshot; the manual is where the rules live. "To perform at my best I need deep work in the mornings" only helps if it's written down where future-you will obey it.
The second pass: does the calendar match the job?
Same two weeks, different question. Take your founder job description — the outcomes you own, the decisions only you can make — and mark every block that serves it. What's left is work that belongs to someone else's job, or to nobody's. The energy pass tells you what the week costs; the role pass tells you whether you're spending it on the right job. The blocks that fail both tests go first.
Most people running this for the first time find well over half their calendar is red. That's not a verdict on you — it's the diagnosis, and it's exactly why the exercise is worth two highlighters and twenty minutes.
Source / credit
Widely used calendar energy-audit practice — no single originator; adapted for Outstride OS
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