The Energy Calendar
Color-code a week to find what actually creates and drains your energy
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 95%
The mechanism is a one-week audit that converts a vague feeling into data. At the end of each weekday, you color-code every block on your calendar by its energetic effect: green if you felt lifted up, yellow if neutral, red if you were physically drained. After a week you have a clear picture of which activities — and which people — create energy versus drain it. The insight is not just 'do more green.' The higher-leverage move is modification: take the biggest red block and ask whether it can be done differently rather than eliminated. Bloom ran this while working an 80-100 hour finance week as a junior associate who couldn't refuse anything, and found his top drainer was calls and Zooms. He couldn't decline them, but he could take half of them walking — and the same call became energy-creating. In Bloom's model, the things that create energy for you are what produce the 10x, 100x, 1000x outcomes.
Origin
Extracted from Young and Profiting. Bloom developed the exercise while working an 80-100 hour-per-week private equity job and teaches it in The 5 Types of Wealth.
Core principles
- 01Energy, not time, is the truly finite resource.
- 02You are not evenly energetic across the 16 hours you're awake.
- 03Outsized outcomes come from work that pulls you, not work you push through.
- 04You have more control over your calendar than you think, even inside a 9-to-5.
- 05Data beats intuition — you cannot guess your own drainers accurately.
How to run it
- 1
Pick a normal week
Choose an ordinary working week, not a holiday or a launch week. The audit is only useful if the calendar is representative.
Watch out A distorted week produces a distorted map and a bad reallocation.
- 2
Color-code at the end of each day
At the end of a Monday, go through the calendar and mark each activity green (created energy — you felt lifted up), yellow (neutral), or red (draining — you felt physically drained).
Pro tip Do it same-day. By Friday you'll misremember Monday and rationalize the reds.
- 3
Repeat for a full week
Do it every day for five days. One day is anecdote; a week is a pattern you can act on.
- 4
Read the map for activities AND people
At week's end you have a clear picture of the types of activities and the types of people creating energy versus draining it. Both dimensions matter.
Pro tip The people column is usually the one nobody wants to look at. Look at it.
- 5
Modify before you eliminate
Take the biggest red block and ask whether it can be done differently rather than dropped. This is what makes the exercise work for people with no authority to say no.
Pro tip Bloom's fix: take the call while walking. You can't multitask on a walking call, so you show up more present and the outcomes improve.
Watch out 'I have no control, I work a 9-to-5' is almost always false — you have more control than you think.
- 6
Slowly reposition the calendar
Over weeks, shift the balance toward energy creators and away from drainers. Better outcomes, better relationships, and an improved business follow from leaning into the creators.
Pro tip Slowly is the operative word — a violent calendar purge gets reversed within a month.
In the wild
Bloom first ran the exercise as a junior private equity associate working 80-100 hours a week. His biggest energy drainer was phone calls and Zoom meetings — and as an associate he couldn't start saying no to them. So he modified instead of eliminating: he took half his calls while out on a walk. Sitting at his desk on a Zoom was as draining as he could get; the identical call while walking was energy-creating. He loved being outside, and because you can't multitask on a walking call, he was more present.
→ He showed up better on the calls, the outcomes were better, and by the end of the week he felt materially more uplifted — a compounding gain with zero authority required.
Host Hala Taha described running a weekly variant across her company: one hour a week where every team member time-blocks and color-codes their calendar by activity type and shares it with their manager. It surfaces who is spending three hours on the wrong task, who has no breaks, and who has too many calls. Her framing: to-do lists and project management tools don't reveal whether the work will actually get done — the calendar does.
→ A managerial view of where team energy is going, and a mechanism for catching burnout and misallocation before they compound.
Common mistakes
Coding the whole week from memory on Friday
Retrospective coding smooths over the real drains. The signal is the physical feeling at the end of the day it happened.
Jumping straight to elimination
Most red blocks can't be deleted, especially if you're junior. Ask how the activity could be done differently first — that's where the leverage is.
Auditing activities but ignoring people
The map shows which people drain you as clearly as which tasks do. Skipping that column throws away half the insight.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone with a calendar-driven work life who feels consistently drained without knowing precisely what's causing it.
Not ideal for
People whose work isn't calendar-shaped (shift work, fully unstructured days) where there are no blocks to code.
From the transcript
“color code your calendar according to whether the activity created energy, meaning you felt lifted up by it, mark it green. It was neutral, mark…”
“The biggest energy drainer I found on my calendar was uh phone calls and Zoom meetings.”
“you have more control than you think. You just have to be willing to scrutinize a little bit some of the activities and ask, "Can…”
From the episode
Sahil Bloom: How Entrepreneurs Build Real Wealth Beyond Money
Sahil Bloom