Hello everyone. Jasmine here and welcome to a very special sneak preview of More Zest, which is the private podcast inside the Productivity Gym. Now, before we dive in, here’s the exciting news. The doors to the Productivity gym are officially open today.

That’s Friday the 10th of October, and they’re not open for long. But if you’ve been listening to Productivity with Exist and thinking, I love these ideas, but I need the structure and accountability to actually do them, then this is your moment when you join the Productivity Gym. You start with your productivity fitness test.

It’s like an MLT for your productivity. You’ll find out where your strengths are, where you are leaking energy and what to focus on next. Then each month you decide what area of productivity to train. Things like focus, boundaries, energy management, which is what today’s sneak peek is all about and more,

we have weekly coworking sessions where you can get your planning done, get your focus . They’re brilliant. We work together. We support each other. There’s group coaching, you can bring your specific challenges and we will work on them. There’s call workouts monthly where we have workshops on each area of productivity.

Then there is a private podcast. So if you like this episode and you want more, then you need to get into the gym because that’s where you can binge the Private More Zest podcast. And not only that, because I’m all about the action. There’s no point listening to something being inspired and then not know what to do about it.

So for each episode of both Productivity with Zest and More Zest Private podcast , you get a self-coaching kit so you can apply what you learn straight away. It’s like a library. You go in, you decide what you’re working on,

and you pick and choose what you need to work on it all with the support of me and the other gym members. And here’s the fun bit, because the doors are open right now. The sooner you join, the more bonuses you get. I’m talking things like my productivity power pack, PDFs, my planner pack, and even bonus focus audio tracks.

So if you’re ready to ditch that hustle, stop trying to do it all, and finally working away that actually fits your brain and your life. Head to zest productivity.com/tpg to join today. Right. Let’s jump into the sneak preview of Mars est Stop leaking energy like a dodgy tap. Here’s how to stop those hidden energy drains that are slowing you down.

Let’s get into it.

 Well. Hello, lovely people. Jasmine here. Welcome back to Mars est.

Today’s episode is for those of you who’ve ever stared at your screen at 3:00 PM thinking, why am I so tired? I haven’t even done that much. We’re gonna talk about the productivity fuel that no one teaches us to manage, and that is your energy. We’re taught how to manage time, deadlines, inboxes, but no one teaches us to measure our energy, which is our actual capacity to think, create, and decide.

I have fallen into this trap as well. When I look at all my episodes of productivity with Zest and all the training that I’ve done, I have very, very rarely talked about energy management, but it’s huge and we don’t always actually need more time. We need to stop leaking energy that we don’t even realize we’re losing.

If you feel like you’ve been busy, but not making progress. If small decisions are feeling really heavy, it’s not laziness and it’s likely energy mismanagement. Here are three sneaky traps that can drain your productivity, fitness, and what to do about them. So the first is decision fatigue. We make 35,000 decisions a day.

Yes. Really Google it as chat. Lots of them are subconsciously, but lots and lots are conscious, and it is no wonder that by the end of the day, the whole question of what’s fatigue can feel like a crisis. Because we are fatigued. We have done too many decisions, our decision making capacity is gone. Think of how many decisions you make just before you do the school run in the morning.

The top tip is to be your future friend. Make some decisions in advance. So pick your outfits, your meals, your work priorities the night before. This is why planning for the week, the week before or the night before, really, really works. Pre-decide where you can because your future self will. Thank you.

Steve Jobs was a great example of this. He famously wore the same outfit every day, black turtleneck jeans and new balance trainers, and it wasn’t because he only loved those clothes. I didn’t have any style or. Originality or anything like that. It was because he knew that every decision costs energy. So fewer choices equal more brain power for what actually matters.

So what can you decide in advance? What choices can you take off your list? Track two is the constant switching the emails, the tabs going to the kids, looking on slack every time you switch Task. You burn a bit of your focus fuel because you’re not multitasking. Remember, I’m really keen for you to pick up this.

You are not multitasking. We can’t do that. Our brains cannot multitask. We are repeatedly task switching and this leaves some of your attention behind that attention residue. This reduces your focus and it tires you out. Top tip with this is try batching group similar tasks together. So if you’ve got lots of slack messages to get back, to keep notifications off.

Then when you choose to go to them a couple of times a day, whenever you feel like you need to, more often, if you think or less do them all at once, if you group similar tasks together, you’re not switching, you’re not losing that focus. And when you’re doing those tasks that are the same close other tabs, close other things down, even 15 minutes of focus work can change the game.

And number three is ignoring your dips. And I am terrible at this. Your brain runs in 90 minute cycles with deep focus then a dip. And the dip is not failure, it is biology. It’s how we are designed to work. So building a short break, after 90 minutes a walk, a stretch cup of tea, you’ll return sharper and faster.

This is definitely the one that I need to learn. So hold me accountable guys. At this point, just a quick question for you to reflect on, which one of these traps. Do you feel most keenly? Do you fall into most often, which of these is having the strongest effect? So is it decision fatigue? Is it the constant switching, or is it ignoring your dips?

I need to tell you about yesterday, I’m recording this on Friday, the 6th of June, and yesterday was a textbook example of what not to do with your energy. The irony that I’ve had this in mind to do for the podcast and the workshop last night was meant to be about energy management is not lost on me. So the day started early.

I got up early, which already is not great for me. I am not a morning person, and I’d gone to bed late the night before. And first thing, I dropped the kids off at Breakfast Club and then I was out the door to a networking event, which was really fun. It was really valuable. I had some great conversations, met some great new people, and built relationships with people I already knew.

But it was also really draining with all the conversations and selling myself, which I, I love it, but it’s draining. I came home and I literally jumped straight away into delivering a 15 minute. Productivity power shot for a group I’m part of. I squeezed in a 10 minute call with my sister who was having a little mini crisis, didn’t have a breather, didn’t have a pause.

I then went straight into recording a podcast interview, and I had prepped for the interview. I had questions ready, and I’d also prepped for that power shot. So I’d done the preparation, but not obviously, the actual event. So I jumped straight into this interview with a guest I’d not met before, and my mic decided to have a complete meltdown.

So half an hour of tech stress, and I’m very techie. I had to get my husband’s help, which was a bit annoying, and she picked up on that and then was like, oh, he’s like the tech hero. And I’m like, oh, no, no. I’m actually very techy, actually. Dunno why that was triggering. But anyway, we finally got going. She was really kind to aware, but by the end I was flagging because that hour of the podcast interview was very taxing.

I had to be really active with my listening. Really, really focused on what she was saying. Remembering things she was saying, asking great questions, vibing off her. I needed to make sure it was professional, needed to make sure my listeners could learn something from it. That took a lot. I then had a quick half hour break literally from a lunch.

Then I had two back to back 90 minute coaching sessions. I love coaching and it is what I’m built for, but it takes energy. One was a great session with someone who I’ve done six sessions with, and it was a bit of a round off, a bit of a celebration of the growth, the reflection on the journey, and it was really encouraging, but it took a lot of effort to prepare for.

The second session was with a fairly new client who is very different to a lot of my clients and it needs me to be very different. So that again, took lots of energy. After that, I quickly finished planning the workshop. I was running for the evening. I shoved some tea down. Luckily, Cy was around, so he made me tea, did a bit more prep, had a half an hour break, and then went into the workshop and now the workshop didn’t go ahead because only one person showed, and she could have really done with the evening off as well.

That was totally fine. I’m completely fine that it didn’t happen, but by then I was. Utterly shattered. I was so drained that I had a massive snap binge, which is my usual coping mechanism. And I also was really snappy with signing the kids, you know, and you just can tell you’re not quite being the mom or the wife that you want to be, which wasn’t great.

And the thing that I didn’t account for was that I didn’t just fill my calendar. I filled it with back to back high energy output things for me. Networking, presenting, interviewing, coaching, all things I absolutely love and I’m great at, but all massive energy drains and I gave myself no buffer, no margin, and no real recovery space between them.

So if I were coaching myself, which I do, here’s what I would say to me. I would encourage me to look ahead with an energy lens. Not just, do I have time for this, but how much energy will this take and how much will I have left? I’d building buffers, even 15 to 30 minutes of real decompression between big energy blocks would’ve helped massively and use those buffers well, not to do my notes or catch up on emails, which I did in the half an hour gaps I had.

But if I’d have gone for a quick walk, a stretch cup of tea, watching the birds walked away from my phone, all of that would’ve helped massively. I’m not great at breaking for my work. My superpower of focus keeps me going, but I do really feel it afterwards. The other thing that I could have done is to protect my peak time.

Knowing I’m not on my best daily. I could have said no to the early start, or at least not stacked a heavy day behind it. I could have also batched better if I was overwhelmed with tasks rather than the events that I’d planned. I could have tried grouping similar tasks together, blocking out time for deep rest in between.

So yesterday I had an energy awareness problem, maybe an energy planning problem, and I’m definitely feeling the effects of it today. So I’ve got a quick reset tool you can use, and it’s one way to start working with your energy instead of against it. You could try the energy scan, pick one day this week, set an alarm to go off on the hour every hour, and then pause and note, how’s my energy?

What have I just done? What am I doing right now? And what’s coming next. You can do that for your workday. You can do it for the evening as well, but you can notice your rhythms. Then when do you feel focused? When in the day is your energy highest? When do you crash? What tasks give you energy? What tasks drain you?

This is about figuring out when your energy naturally peaks, when it naturally dips, and it’s about working with it. So what small shift are you gonna try this week? You could move your most important tasks to your natural peak time. You could swap out your 2:00 PM doom scroll for a 10 minute walk. You could block out no meeting zones where your energy is high, and use that time on those important tasks.

Pick one action point. Could be one of those, one of your own, and just try it. And don’t aim for perfection. Just notice experiment. That is how your productivity fitness builds Just one small rep at a time. You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. You just need to notice what fuels you and what burns you.

That is the real work of energy management, so be kind to your brain. Honor your dips. Let yourself rest. Let your rhythms guide you and don’t beat yourself up when you mismanage your energy like I did yesterday. Just learn and adapt. I certainly am going to be doing,

 oh, I do hope you loved that episode of More Zest. Inside the productivity gym, this is exactly the kind of work we do every single week. Simple, practical, backed by psychology to help you build clarity, consistency, and calm all the Cs. If this resonated with you, imagine what would happen if you actually trained your productivity fitness every week.

Not just listened but implemented. When you join, you’ll take your productivity fitness test to find your strengths and focus areas. Maybe energy is the one that needs a reset. Maybe it’s boundaries. Maybe it’s your focus, maybe it’s prioritization. Then you’ll have all the tools, coaching and community support to improve its step by step.

Remember, the doors are open right now, but only for a short time. They close on Friday, the 17th of October, and then they’re not going to reopen again until 2026. The sooner you join, the more bonuses you’ll unlock, so don’t wait. Come join us at zest productivity.com/tpg and start building your productivity fitness today because you deserve to stop leaking energy, stop feeling stretched, and start working in a way that truly works for you.

Until next time, keep your energy high, your focus clear, and as always, live with zest.

 And that’s all for today. Thank you for joining me on Productivity with Zest. If you want to figure out what area of productivity is holding you back, take my quiz at www.zestproductivity.com/quiz and I’ll give you some tips to help you along the way. If you’ve enjoyed this, hit follow. So you never missed an episode.

And if you’re feeling generous, please leave a review because it really helps. If you want to hear more, head to www.zestproductivity.com. Until next time, stay focused, stay balanced, and keep bringing the zest to your productivity activity.