Leaders don't run out of time first—they run out of emotional energy.
Every morning, you wake up with an invisible $100 in your emotional bank account. By afternoon, most leaders are already overdrawn.
Leadership demands constant engagement—conversations, emails, planning, budgets, opportunities. Add family and life on top of that, and it forces a deeper question: What is your emotional bank? How much do you have to spend on emotional energy daily, and how is that spread across your days?
This matters deeply because attention and energy are your scarcest currencies. Steward them where they compound: the work only you can do and the people only you can serve.
Three Keys to Stewarding Your Energy
1. Know yourself. Name what energizes and depletes you.
2. Track the leaks. Identify the top 3 drains this week.
3. Carry weight wisely. Share, delegate, or release—don't hoard.
Peter Drucker captured the focus principle perfectly: "Effective executives concentrate on one thing if they expect to get anything done. They do first things first and they do one thing at a time." 1This isn't productivity theater—it's about stewarding your emotional energy with intention.
In a recent conversation with one of the leaders in my organization, he brought up the concept of the emotional bank. To make it more practical, he put a value in dollars on it. That image really stayed with me and made me think: if emotional energy is like money, how am I spending it each day?
The Math of Emotional Energy
Picture your emotional bank account starting each day with $100. In the morning, you spend $15 just clearing emails and messages. Then comes the main chunk of the day—meetings, decisions, and conversations—that drains another $50. By mid-afternoon, you've already spent $65 of your work energy budget.
Then, suddenly, a work crisis hits that demands $50 worth of energy. The math doesn't work. You only have $35 left. You can "borrow" against tomorrow by sacrificing sleep, rest, or your presence with family, but now you're at –$15.
We live in a culture that demands the now-now solution impulse. This can be dangerous—because it tempts us to trade long-term sustainability for short-term relief. Borrowing against tomorrow's energy may solve today's crisis, but it builds a deficit that compounds over time.
But then you shift to personal time,caring for your family, handling personal responsibilities,which draws from a separate energy pool entirely. However, when you're already emotionally overdrawn from work, you show up depleted for the people who matter most.
If this pattern repeats, that deficit compounds. Just as with financial debt, emotional overdraft shows up everywhere: exhaustion, irritability, poor decisions, and strained relationships.
The truth is simple: You cannot lead well from emotional overdraft.
The Foundation of Leadership
This is why stewarding your emotional bank isn't optional—it's foundational to leadership.
Start by tracking your energy for one week. Note when you feel most energized versus most drained. One leader I know discovered that back-to-back video calls destroyed his afternoon productivity, so he began scheduling 15-minute buffers between virtual meetings. This simple change transformed his second half of every day. Another leader observed that certain conversations were encouraging while others were depleting, so he became more intentional about spreading them throughout his schedule to balance his energy flow.
In my observation, this is one of the biggest challenges leaders face today. We live in a culture that rewards constant activity, yet neglects the deeper question of energy and presence. The temptation is to keep doing more, but the greater challenge is to show up whole, grounded, and attentive to what matters most.
Pre-Allocate Your Daily $100
Before your workday starts, budget your emotional energy like cash:
$30 → Deep work/strategy
$25 → Operations (email, admin, routine tasks)
$35 → People (meetings, 1:1s, feedback)
$10 → Buffer for the unexpected2
Note: This $100 represents your work energy allocation only. Family and personal time draw from your total life energy pool during non-work hours—a separate and equally important budget to steward wisely.
If a crisis costs more than your buffer, reschedule something immediately instead of "borrowing" from sleep or family time.
Leadership isn't just about how much you accomplish—it's about the energy, presence, and clarity you bring to the people and the work that matter most. When you steward your emotional resources with intention, you don't just survive the demands of leadership; you thrive in them.
Because leadership is not about doing more, it's about showing up full for what matters most.
If your emotional bank only gave you $100 today, how would you choose to spend it?
What resonates most with you about this emotional bank concept? Share this with a leader who needs to hear it today.
P.S. This article was supposed to publish yesterday (first Tuesday of the month), but I had to postpone it by one day due to my own emotional energy budget being spent. Sometimes the best way to teach a principle is to live it.
Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harper Business, 2006).
Work energy allocation framework based on Harvard Business School research tracking 60,000 hours of CEO time across 27 executives (Porter & Nohria, "How CEOs Manage Time," Harvard Business Review, July-August 2018).