“You can’t sprint through a marathon — and software development is definitely a marathon.”

As developers, we love optimising things: code, queries, CI pipelines, build times. But there’s one system we often overlook — ourselves.

Time is Rigid, Energy is Fluid

Time management is a classic topic in productivity. Block calendars. Estimate sprints. Make Gantt charts. But here’s the catch: time is finite and linear. It doesn’t care how you feel. Energy, on the other hand, is your real capacity to think, decide, and create.

In software development — a discipline built on deep thought, problem-solving, and clarity — energy isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation of quality work.

The Real Productivity Multiplier: Schedule Control

The more autonomy you have over your daily schedule, the better you can align your high-energy hours with high-value tasks.

That’s why the best engineers and product thinkers often don’t just ask, “What will I get done today?” but rather “When am I best able to do this kind of thinking?”

If you get your best coding done between 9 AM and noon, guard that time. Schedule meetings later. If you’re more reflective after a walk or late at night, save architecture decisions or debugging sessions for then.

Control over your schedule is control over your effectiveness.

Two Tie-Breakers for Your Decisions

When you’re unsure which opportunity or task to take on, try these two questions:

1. Which option gives me more freedom over my time and energy?
2. Which one will teach me more?

Freedom means fewer context switches, fewer urgent interruptions, and fewer downstream commitments. And learning compounds — in tech, knowledge is leverage.

Even if you can’t predict the outcome of a decision, choosing the path with more autonomy and learning tends to pay off.

The Bottom 20% Rule

Let’s be honest: in your backlog, inbox, or calendar, some things simply won’t matter.

When you shift from managing time to managing energy, there will be things you don’t get around to. And that’s okay. The trick is to let them go consciously, not guiltily.

Think of the last time something truly bad happened because you didn’t do a task that was in the bottom 20% of your priorities. Hard to recall, isn’t it?

Ship the feature. Skip the unnecessary retro. Answer that Slack ping tomorrow. If your mind is spent, the marginal return on doing low-priority work is worse than resting and returning with clarity.

Final Thought

Managing your energy isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing what matters better.

In software, we celebrate elegant code that solves hard problems with minimal effort. It’s time we applied the same thinking to how we work — not just what we work on.