Why your energy allocation matters more than your work ethic
You end your day exhausted. Your mind is fried. Your body is drained. You collapse into bed thinking: "I crushed it today."
Then you wake up the next morning and can't actually point to anything you accomplished.
This is the central contradiction of modern business ownership, and it's killing your effectiveness.
Two Types of Exhaustion
Your body isn't designed to maintain a constant, flat effort level. Your heart rate rises and falls. You have intense periods and recovery periods. Your energy naturally fluctuates based on demand.
A professional athlete understands this viscerally. They know the difference between two types of exhaustion:
Good Tired: The exhaustion you feel after pushing your body hard in service of a specific goal. You sprinted, lifted heavy, trained hard—and you're measurably better because of it. Your fatigue is evidence of progress.
Bad Tired: The exhaustion of chaos. You were in motion all day. You felt busy. You responded to everything. But you can't point to a single meaningful outcome. Your fatigue is evidence of nothing.
Business owners, here's the hard truth: most of you are experiencing bad tired masquerading as good tired.
The Headless Chicken
Imagine a chicken running around frantically with its head cut off. It's in constant motion. It's absolutely exhausted. It's also accomplishing nothing.
Most entrepreneurs spend their day like that chicken—responding to emails, taking unscheduled calls, jumping between tasks, "putting out fires," attending meetings they didn't plan for.
At the end of the day, they're wiped out.
But here's the critical question nobody asks: What ROI did that exhaustion generate?
The answer, more often than not, is: "I have no idea."
Enter: The Bracketing Method
Here's what changes everything. You have to start bracketing your effort.
This means creating discrete units of work where every block of time has a clear input, a clear activity, and a measurable output. You're not just "working hard." You're working hard on something specific and you can point to what that something generated.
It looks like this:
[HIGH WATTAGE: Deal Sourcing]
- Duration: 3 hours
- Effort: Maximum focus, deep work, strategic analysis
- Output: Discovered $60M acquisition opportunity, advanced pipeline by X stage
- ROI: Directly tied to growth strategy
[HIGH WATTAGE: Strategic Planning]
- Duration: 2 hours
- Effort: Thinking, analysis, decision-making
- Output: Mapped Q1 acquisition targets, clarified priorities
- ROI: Unlocked direction for entire team
[MODERATE WATTAGE: Team Alignment]
- Duration: 1 hour
- Effort: Communication, delegation, coordination
- Output: Team clarity on weekly priorities
- ROI: Prevents downstream chaos and rework
[LOW WATTAGE: Administrative]
- Duration: 30 minutes
- Effort: Process work, maintenance
- Output: Inbox managed, routine tasks completed
- ROI: Necessary upkeep, not growth
End of Day Audit:
- Total high-wattage hours: 5
- Direct revenue impact: $60M opportunity advanced
- Strategic clarity: Achieved
- Exhaustion level: Maximum
- Attribution: Crystal clear
This is good tired. This is the exhaustion of someone who shipped something that matters.
Why This Transforms Everything
Most business owners can't answer basic questions about their own effort:
- "Where did I really bring my best focus today?"
- "Which of my activities generated the most ROI?"
- "How much time did I waste on low-return work?"
- "Am I recovering enough to sustain this pace?"
Bracketing forces the answer.
When you segment your work into discrete units with clear boundaries, something magical happens: effort becomes attributable to outcome.
You're no longer just "busy." You're specifically channeling energy into high-leverage activities and measuring what you get back.
The Heart Rate Principle
Here's the physiology: Your resting heart rate is 60-80 bpm. Moderate activity pushes you to 100-130 bpm. Maximum effort gets you to 150+ bpm.
Your body isn't designed to stay at 120 bpm all day. That would be unsustainable. The variation—the rise and fall—is what allows you to perform at peak capacity.
Similarly, your business work should have intensity variation:
- Peak intensity: High-leverage, revenue-generating, strategic activities
- Sustainable intensity: Operational, management, execution work
- Recovery: Administrative, routine, low-stakes tasks
The executive who treats every email like a critical decision and every call like a major negotiation burns out without shipping anything meaningful.
The executive who brackets—"This hour is peak intensity on deal sourcing, this meeting is sustainable intensity, this admin block is recovery"—can operate at maximum capacity indefinitely because they're varying intensity intentionally.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here's what most people don't want to admit: You're probably not as busy as you think you are.
You're reactive. You're scattered. You're responding instead of directing. And that's exhausting because your brain can't make sense of it.
The executive who works 5 focused, bracketed hours on high-leverage work is more productive than the one who "works" 12 scattered, reactive hours.
And here's the kicker—the bracketed executive is less exhausted because their exhaustion is meaningful. It's tied to outcomes they can point to.
What Needs to Change
If you want to stop being chaotically tired and start being effectively tired, you need to:
1. Bracket Your Work Define clear blocks. [High Wattage: Revenue], [Moderate: Operations], [Low: Admin]. Know what each block is for before you enter it.
2. Protect Peak Hours Your best cognitive work happens at specific times. Treat [HIGH WATTAGE] blocks like they're non-negotiable. No email. No meetings. No interruptions.
3. Measure Attribution At the end of each bracketed block, ask: "What did this generate?" If you can't answer, you're doing low-wattage work disguised as high-wattage work.
4. Build in Recovery You need [LOW WATTAGE] blocks to recover. This isn't laziness. This is how your system sustains. An athlete doesn't sprint the entire race—they pace themselves.
5. Audit Ruthlessly At the end of the week, month, quarter: Where did your peak energy go? Is it aligned with your biggest opportunities? Or are you bringing max effort to routine tasks?
The Competitive Advantage
Here's what separates high-performing business owners from everyone else: they understand their own energy economics.
They know:
- Which activities generate ROI and deserve peak wattage
- Which activities are important but sustainable-intensity
- Which activities are necessary but low-leverage
- When they need recovery to function optimally
Everyone else just... works. They're busy. They're tired. They have no idea if they're winning.
The bracketing method isn't about working harder. It's about working intelligently—matching your effort to your leverage, measuring your output, and understanding whether your exhaustion is productive or just chaotic.
The One Question to Ask Yourself Tonight
At the end of your day, ask yourself honestly:
"Am I tired because I moved something that matters forward, or am I tired because I was in reactive motion all day?"
If you can't answer that question with clarity and confidence, you need to start bracketing.
Because the goal isn't to avoid exhaustion. The goal is to make sure your exhaustion means something.
Be tired from shipping. Be tired from strategic breakthroughs. Be tired from closing deals and building systems that move needles.
Just don't be tired from running around like a headless chicken.
Ross Armstrong of Pillar Optimization Partners, where we help business owners understand their actual leverage, bracket their effort intentionally, and measure what matters. Because you deserve to be tired from winning, not from chaos.
