3 Ways to Eliminate Energy Vampires
Happy Halloween week! This year, I’m celebrating the holiday more than normal, as two of my best friends are visiting from Australia, and I want to give them a good old-fashioned American Halloween. And as part of that, I talked Dave into ordering full-size candy bars for trick-or-treaters(!!!). So while my momentum was strong, I wanted to bring the theme to work too, by eliminating your energy vampires.
The first time I heard the phrase Energy Vampire was from my friend, author Rebecca Pacheco. Over the past 15 years, I’ve thought about this concept so much, stopping at nothing to eliminate each and every energy vampire from my life.
And just this year, I’ve really been bringing the concept to work too. As you know, I’m all about efficiency. So streamlining and cutting out time vampires has always been no problem. But energy vampires? That part finally clicked this year, care of Matt Mochary’s Great CEO Within.
I hit energy rock bottom, 2 distinct times this year and realized: these vampires sneak up on you silently: a little suck here, a little suck there. Until eventually, you feel drained of life.
Sometimes the villain behind an energy vampire is a big thing to unwind, like an employee who’s bringing drama with them to work; finishing a project with a soul sucking client; or a pricing overhaul.
But I’ve also learned that alongside those, there are always easy technology tweaks that can give you back so much time and headspace. Here are the 3 that have made the biggest difference to me…
1. Automate billing & payment collection.
Four years ago, Supporting Strategies (who’s also a beloved long-term client) overhauled our bookkeeping and set up automated payments for us with bill.com. I cannot tell you the brain space and ease it’s brought to my life, to not be chasing clients for payment – and for them too – to not have to remit a payment each month.
In fact, when it comes to billing, the message in our onboarding packet says: “Our billing process is set it and forget it, which leaves you one less thing to do each month and allows us to put our brain space on solving the most important problems for your business.”
Internally, this data feeds directly into Quickbooks each month so that our CFO (yours truly, ha) can easily see our business’s real revenue and even revenue segmentation by client and product. This has been the biggest tech upgrade in our business’s history.
2. Make appointments with a scheduling tool.
You know that I’m a nut about keeping an organized calendar. But this tendency for organization has its own challenges, namely: you get stuck in follow-up hell and if-then paralysis. I’ve fallen into the trap myself: I’m trying to be so organized and optimized about my time, that I get stuck in wait-and-see’s, while I’m waiting for others to confirm meetings. This results in a not-fun game of calendar Tetris and a mental list of never-ending follow-ups.
Enter the scheduler (personally, I use Calendly).
When I’m closing a meeting with a client, I pull up Calendly and schedule our next meeting on the spot. Follow-up be gone. When someone externally wants to meet (like for business development), I email them a link for us to find a mutually agreeable time, eliminating back and forth emails.
You may be wondering: why don’t you just pull up your calendar and schedule directly in there, without the intermediary? Because: I’m someone who thinks, “I can just squeeze in one more thing.” Sound familiar?
Using a tool like this, protects you from yourself. If you pre-schedule your rules, it eliminates the energy you spend on moving appointments around and stretching yourself too thin. For example, these days, I never see more than 3 clients in a day. Calendly protects me from myself, to better sustain my daily energy.
3. Remove email from your phone.
I do receive some strange and incredulous looks when I tell people I don’t have email on my phone. At this point in our technological and societal progression, carrying email around with us is the status quo. I heard an interesting thing last week:
When you’re a knowledge worker, having 24/7 email access on your phone means: you literally never leave ‘the office.’
Let that sink in.
I realize: it takes a lot of organization and proactive work to set yourself up this way. But my gosh, (to me) the set-up investment is totally worth it.
These are 3 suggestion that aren’t easy, but they are simple. Taking small but powerful actions like these, set up a force field around you. Those little vampires cannot get to you, sucking away your time, productivity, and energy. These are ways to level-up by doing less. The benefit is immense. It’s freedom. Whitespace. Clarity of thought. Energy.
Happy Halloween!
