I’ve talked about time and time management in a previous post,, explicitly how time is something we don’t just happen to have in our pocket or find lying around, but is something we actually own. A lot of power comes from viewing time as a personal resource under your control. Specifically when it comes to being intentional about both the costs of creating it and the importance of spending it wisely on things that rank towards the top of your personal and professional priority lists. 

However, today’s digital and meta world requires us to be intentional about more than just our time management skills. The much bigger variable in play is one invisible to most people, and that’s the amount of energy they have available. More specifically, being able to accurately gauge the amount of energy required to manage the ask that comes across your desk, especially when the ask is merely framed as a time or scheduling question. 

I suggest my clients use the concept of bandwidth to measure the real cost involved in the asks they receive because it explicitly measures energy across time. As an analogy, look at your home internet connection. 900MB/sec is a lot more information flowing than 150 MB/sec, and those numbers explicitly illustrate the rate of energy as information measured in Megabytes flowing per unit of time as measured in seconds. In your home a lot of bandwidth being used by one streaming device impacts what’s available for other things. The same holds true for your brain, especially when managing a complex mix of personal and professional responsibilities. 

I like to remind my clients of this framing with a play on Einstein’s famous E=MC2 equation where I set it up as Bandwidth = Time x Energy2, or B=TE2. This is how any work project, social event, or other ask should be evaluated rather than as just as a simple time or scheduling demand. And look at my equation carefully. The Energy component is squared here, just like the C in Einstein’s equation, as that is the much more important thing to be considered. Your bandwidth is what is really being tasked here, not just your time, and you only have so much available. 

Next time you are on the receiving end of an ask, either a social get together or a role in a new project at work, see if this reframe is a helpful tool for you. Look underneath the simple time or scheduling question. Think about the energy requirements that come into play for this request, and then square those before circling back to the time aspect. Are you willing to own the time requirements needed for this ask? More importantly, are you able to devote the required energy, especially the full amount necessary to show up as your best self? 

Now you are reframing the original ask in a way that helps you more clearly evaluate the costs, and from there more accurately gauge your interest in committing yourself to it. This useful reframe gives you the real question to consider – are you willing to allocate the necessary amount of bandwidth needed here?