A Gift for Your Future Self
A Simple Exercise to Reshape Your Coming Year
I want to give you permission to take 15 minutes for yourself.
Whether you're celebrating Christmas, enjoying time off during the holiday season, or simply catching your breath during this end-of-year pause, I'm offering something different than the usual. Between the festivities, gatherings, and seasonal meals, grab your phone or a piece of paper and find a quiet corner.
I promise this will be transformational.
I call it the Energy Audit. The premise is simple: our most impactful work happens when we're energized, yet we rarely take time to systematically understand what energizes and drains us. Choose one lens to examine (if you want to do all three that's great, but do them one at a time):
Professional Work: What parts of your work light you up? What drags you down? Creative Work: When are you most productive? What activities block your flow? Relationships: Which work interactions fuel you? Which deplete you?
Here's the exercise:
First 5 Minutes - Energy Drains List everything that consistently drains your energy in your chosen area. Be specific. Instead of "meetings," write "bi-weekly strategy meetings where we rehash old decisions." Instead of "email," write "responding to non-urgent questions that could be found in documentation." The more specific you are, the more actionable your insights will be.
Next 5 Minutes - Energy Sources List what energizes you in that same area. Again, be specific. Look for patterns. Are you most energized when creating? When solving complex problems? When helping others? The patterns matter more than individual instances.
Final 5 Minutes - The One Change Review both lists. We're not looking for a dramatic change for the next year. Look for one thing you can remove or substantially affect in the drain list, and one thing you can bolster or change in the Energy Sources list.
Here's my own recent Energy Audit through the Creative Work lens:
Energy Drains:
Not having a clear target to start the day
Writing when I haven't done enough pre-work thinking (leads to false-starts and unhelpful cyclical thinking)
Context switching between different projects
Editing before the first draft has been completed
Energy Sources:
Morning writing sessions when I've done prework the day before
Writing ideas down immediately when they hit me
Focused deep work blocks working on one thing
Reading well-written pieces in seemingly unrelated domains
My Two Changes:
Remove: I'm breaking up with my habit of jumping straight into writing without preparation. Before I write, I will enforce a pre-work rule and ask myself "Do I know what I want to say?" If I don't, then it tells me that I haven't developed an idea enough to start writing.
Bolster: I'm protecting my morning writing blocks more fiercely. No meetings, no email - just pure creation time until 11am.
Consider this my holiday gift to you - not just the exercise, but the permission to take these 15 minutes for yourself. In a season that's often about giving to others, sometimes the most valuable gift is the time we give ourselves to reflect and adjust course.
It doesn't take much to make a big impact on 2025. Think about it like a ship: if we make a subtle change in heading at the start of our journey, we can profoundly affect where we end up. We can end up on a different continent with just a slightly different heading.
I'll be back next week to talk about the year ahead, but for now, I'd love to hear what insights your Energy Audit reveals. Share in the comments if you'd like - sometimes seeing others' realizations helps us understand our own patterns better.
I Broke Amazon Twice. Here's How.
Speaking of learning from mistakes and making changes, I just published a YouTube video called "I Broke Amazon Twice. Here's How." It's a deep dive into two massive incidents I caused during my time there. One involved accidentally deleting thousands of movies from Prime Video (oops), and the other... well, let's just say Amazon couldn’t process their orders in the US for some number of hours. What I learned from these failures shaped my career and life.