The simple energy audit that completely changed how I design my week—and why it might transform yours too

For the first year of my retirement, I got up at six. I drank coffee at the same time I always had. I did my walk before nine. And I tried to “get things done” between ten and noon — emails, paperwork, errands, all the bits and pieces of a life I was trying to organise.

By two in the afternoon, I was wilted. By five, I was hopeless company. By eight, I’d be watching television I didn’t even like.

It took me embarrassingly long to figure out what was wrong.

The corporate calendar I never threw out

I was running a corporate calendar without the corporate job.

The shape of my old working life — sharpest in the morning, lunch around midday, post-lunch slump, push through to five — was etched so deeply into me that I never thought to question it. It was just how the day went.

So I was forcing my best hours into emails and admin, and dragging my flat hours through the things that actually mattered. The good thinking I should have done with my morning energy got squandered on phone calls and reorganising the pantry. The conversations I should have had in my second wind got pushed into the slump where I had nothing to give.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

What changed everything was a one-week experiment. It’s called an energy audit, and I now do it with everyone I coach. It’s the most useful piece of self-knowledge I’ve ever picked up — and it costs nothing but a notebook.

The audit

For one week, you carry around a small notebook (or use the notes app on your phone). At the start of every two-hour block while you’re awake, you write down two numbers between one and five.

The first is your energy level. One is wilted, five is sparkling.

The second is what kind of energy you’re craving. One is “I want to be alone with my thoughts.” Five is “I want to be around people, conversation, ideas.”

That’s it. Don’t analyse. Don’t change anything yet. Just notice.

Set a reminder on your phone if you’d like — every two hours from when you wake. Or just check in whenever you remember. Imperfect data is still data.

At the end of seven days you’ll have something like fifty little observations. And almost everyone — I mean almost everyone — discovers something they didn’t know about themselves.

What you’ll probably find

Three patterns show up for nearly everyone who does this.

The first is that your peak isn’t quite where you thought it was. You may have always thought of yourself as a morning person, but the audit shows your sharpest hours are actually 10am to noon, not 6 to 8. Or the other way around — you’d assumed mornings, and it turns out your real peak is a quiet, focused stretch from 4 to 6pm.

The second is that you have an introvert/extrovert rhythm you may not be tuned in to. After decades of work scheduling around someone else’s rhythm, most of us don’t know our own. You’ll likely find hours when you crave company, and hours when even your favourite person feels like too much. Both are normal. Both are useful.

The third — and this is the one that surprised me most — is that the rhythm shifts day to day in ways that aren’t random. Sleep matters. So does what you ate the night before. So does whether you walked that morning, what you watched, who you spoke to. Once you can see the pattern, you can start to influence it.

How to redesign your week

Once you have the audit, the redesign is simpler than you’d expect. Three steps.

Move your most demanding things into your peak hours. The conversation you’ve been avoiding. The creative work that needs your best self. The decision you’ve been putting off. Stop wasting peak hours on email, errands, and the ordinary admin that doesn’t need a sharp mind. Those hours are the most valuable currency you have.

Stop expecting productivity in your low hours. This was my hardest lesson. I used to feel guilty about my 2pm flatness. I’d push through, get nothing useful done, and then feel worse. Now I plan around it. A walk. A nap. A podcast. A slow cup of tea on the back step. The flat hours are not failures. They’re recovery, if you let them be.

Match your social rhythm. If your audit shows you crave company in the evenings, schedule weekly things for then. If you crave solitude in the mornings, protect them ferociously. A surprising amount of the lonely-or-overwhelmed feeling in retirement comes from being with people when you wanted to be alone, or alone when you wanted to be with people.

Why this matters more than time management

In my work I talk about four ingredients of a fulfilling retirement: health and vitality, meaningful connections and growth, living with purpose, and dreaming big. (If you missed Tuesday’s article on the four ingredients, you can find it here.)

Energy mapping sits firmly under the first ingredient — health and vitality. But it’s also the foundation for every other ingredient.

You can’t deepen your relationships if you’re trying to socialise during your flat hours. You can’t pursue purpose if you’re spending your sharp hours on errands. And you certainly can’t dream big if you’re wilted by the time you’d actually have space to dream.

When you start designing your week around your real energy instead of an imagined corporate schedule, all four ingredients quietly get easier. Not because anything magical is happening — but because you’re finally giving yourself the conditions to thrive in.

This is the difference between time management and energy design. Time management asks: how much can I fit in? Energy design asks: how do I match what I do to when I’m best at doing it?

The second question is the one that actually changes a retirement.

Back to that wilted afternoon

I still have flat afternoons. The audit didn’t give me boundless energy — it gave me honest data about the energy I do have, and where to put it.

Now my best hours go to writing, thinking, and the kinds of conversations that need me at my sharpest. My flat hours go to the walks I love, the slow tasks that don’t need brainpower, the resting I used to feel guilty about. My evenings — when I genuinely want company — are when I see friends.

It’s the same number of hours in the same week. But it feels like a different life.

The retirement you want is hidden inside a pattern you haven’t looked at yet. The audit is how you find it.

If this resonates, one of the modules in my course Your Retirement Your Way  walks you through designing a life that aligns with what matters to you with worksheets, reflection prompts, and a simple way of tracking what’s actually changing as you experiment. It gives you a guided, structured way to do this