I am always amazed at how much energy children have. I know many of you have young children and find it challenging to keep up with them.

Spending most of your day in front of a computer drains your energy. Even if you are managing your time well, at the end of each day, you are likely exhausted. Are you doing anything to manage your energy?

If not, I recommend you read the book: The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. I have both the written book and the audio version and I urge you to read or listen to the book if you end each day exhausted.

I love a point the authors make early in the book. They say:

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest. Full engagement begins with feeling eager to get to work in the morning and equally happy to return home in the evening and capable of setting clear boundaries between the two.

The authors assert there are four key energy management principles:

1. Full Engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
2. Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
3. To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
4. Positive energy rituals-highly specific routines for managing energy-are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

Chapter 9 of the book is titled: How Are You Managing Your Energy Now? It includes a good set of questions you can ask yourself. Chapter 10 is titled: Taking Action: The Power of Positive Rituals. In that chapter the authors say:

There are several key elements in building effective energy-management rituals but none is more important as specificity of timing and the precision of behavior during the thirty-to-sixty-day acquisition period.

We have almost completed the first quarter of 2012. That leaves three more quarters this year. What can you do in that time period  to build energy management rituals you will carry forward into 2013?