Manager Energy Audit
A Manager Energy Audit is a quarterly review of how a leader actually spends their time and where that time produces (or destroys) energy. Originated in executive coaching practices and popularized by Marissa Mayer, Stewart Butterfield, and Lara Hogan, the audit categorizes every recurring meeting and major task into four quadrants: High Impact / Energizing, High Impact / Draining, Low Impact / Energizing, Low Impact / Draining. The brutal insight: most managers spend 40-60% of their week in Low Impact / Draining work — meetings nobody needs, status updates that should be docs, and recurring 1:1s on autopilot. The audit is the discipline of looking at your own calendar with hostile eyes and cutting what shouldn't survive.
The Trap
The trap is auditing without authority to change. Many managers run the audit, identify 8 meetings to cut, and then keep all of them because 'they were on the calendar before I got here' or 'someone might be offended.' An audit you don't act on is worse than no audit — it produces awareness without relief, which accelerates burnout. The other trap: confusing 'busy' with 'productive.' A 60-hour week packed with meetings is not leadership — it's failed delegation. If your calendar is full and your team's calendar is also full of meetings WITH you, you've built an org that requires your continuous involvement to function. That's a design failure, not a virtue.
What to Do
Run the audit quarterly. Step 1: Color-code every recurring meeting and task in last week's calendar — green (high impact, energizing), yellow (high impact, draining), red (low impact, draining), blue (low impact, energizing). Step 2: Calculate hours in each quadrant. Step 3: For every red meeting, ask: 'What would happen if I cancelled this?' Most have no real answer. Cancel them. Step 4: For every yellow meeting (high impact but draining), redesign it — change attendees, frequency, format (sync → async), or delegate the chair role. Step 5: Protect at least 30% of your week for green-zone work. Step 6: Re-audit in 90 days.
Formula
In Practice
Stewart Butterfield, then-CEO of Slack, ran a public energy audit in 2019 and discovered he was spending 70% of his week in 1:1s and recurring status meetings — none of which were the strategic, customer-facing, or product work that actually moved Slack. He cancelled 11 standing meetings in one week, replaced 3 weekly 1:1s with bi-weekly cadences, and instituted 'Maker Days' (Tuesdays + Thursdays with no internal meetings). His self-reported energy and decision quality improved within 60 days. Slack's product velocity in the following 6 months produced the major 2020 enterprise updates that drove the Salesforce acquisition.
Pro Tips
- 01
The 'cancel and see who screams' test: cancel any meeting you're unsure about. If nobody asks for it back within 2 weeks, it wasn't needed. Roughly 40% of recurring meetings disappear permanently with this single experiment.
- 02
Track energy at meeting boundaries, not duration. Rate yourself 1-10 on energy entering and exiting each meeting block. The differential reveals what your brain knew before your calendar did. Patterns emerge in 2 weeks: certain people, formats, or topics consistently drain or energize you.
- 03
Lara Hogan's 'donut chart' exercise: at quarter end, draw your time allocation as a pie chart and compare it to what you THINK you should be doing. The gap is usually shocking — managers self-report spending 30% on coaching and discover via the audit they spent 8%.
Myth vs Reality
Myth
“Calendar time and energy are the same thing”
Reality
A 30-minute meeting that drains you costs more cognitive capacity than 2 hours of energizing work. Some managers can do 10 hours of strategic thinking and feel great; the same managers are wrecked by 4 hours of conflict-mediation meetings. Time accounting alone misses 60% of the picture.
Myth
“If everyone wants to meet with me, I should accept”
Reality
Demand for your time is signal that you're a bottleneck, not that you're important. Every meeting you take is a meeting your team doesn't get to make a decision in. The most senior leaders should have the EMPTIEST calendars — that's how they make space for the few decisions only they can make.
Try it
Run the numbers.
Pressure-test the concept against your own knowledge — answer the challenge or try the live scenario.
Knowledge Check
You run your energy audit. You discover that 4 hours/week go to a recurring 'Cross-Functional Sync' meeting that you find draining and that, on reflection, hasn't produced a decision in 8 weeks. What's the right move?
Industry benchmarks
Is your number good?
Calibrate against real-world tiers. Use these ranges as targets — not absolutes.
% of Manager Time on High-Impact Work
Mid- to senior-level managers in scaling tech companies (post-audit data).Optimized
60-75%
Average
30-50%
Calendar Slave
< 25%
Source: https://larahogan.me/blog/manager-energy-tracking/
Real-world cases
Companies that lived this.
Verified narratives with the numbers that prove (or break) the concept.
Slack (Stewart Butterfield)
2019-2020
Stewart Butterfield publicly shared in a 2019 interview that he was working 70+ hours/week and feeling burned out despite being CEO of a $20B company. He ran a structured energy audit and discovered 11 standing meetings he could eliminate, 3 weekly 1:1s that should be bi-weekly, and a culture norm of 'meeting overflow' that meant his afternoons had no thinking time. He instituted 'Maker Days' (no internal meetings on Tuesdays/Thursdays) and his energy and decision quality improved within 60 days. Slack's accelerated 2020 enterprise feature shipping cadence — which directly enabled the $27B Salesforce acquisition — happened in the months following the audit.
Standing Meetings Eliminated
11
Maker Days Per Week
2 (no internal meetings)
Self-Reported Hours Worked
70 → 50 hrs/wk
Salesforce Acquisition
$27B (Dec 2020)
Senior leaders are usually the LAST to apply systemic discipline to their own calendars. The CEO doing this work publicly gives every manager in the company permission to do the same.
Hypothetical: First-Time VP Audit Win
2023
Hypothetical: A newly promoted VP of Customer Success at a 300-person SaaS company ran an energy audit in her first 90 days. She discovered 18 hours/week were going to recurring meetings inherited from her predecessor — 'Customer Health Sync,' 'Cross-Functional Standup,' 'Voice of Customer Review' — most producing zero decisions. She cancelled 14 hours of recurring meetings, replaced them with one weekly 'Decisions Needed' async doc, and reinvested the recovered time into customer calls and skip-levels. Within 2 quarters: NPS up 12 points, GRR up 4%, her engagement score from her own team rose from 62% to 88%.
Recurring Meeting Hours Cut
14 hrs/week
NPS Improvement
+12 points
Gross Revenue Retention
+4 percentage points
Team Engagement
62% → 88%
The single highest-ROI thing a new senior leader can do in their first 90 days is audit and cut inherited meetings. The political cost is small (you're new); the energy and team-time recovery is enormous.
Hypothetical: Founder Audit Inaction
2022
Hypothetical: A 50-person Series A founder-CEO ran an energy audit at his coach's insistence. He identified 16 hours of low-value recurring meetings, including a weekly all-hands that had become a 90-minute monologue. His audit notes said 'cut 12 of these.' Three months later, he cut zero. The reason: 'I might offend people,' 'someone might think I'm checking out,' 'the all-hands is part of our culture.' Six months later he was diagnosed with stress-induced hypertension at age 34 and took a 3-month medical leave. The all-hands continued in his absence — produced by a director — and was rated higher by the team. The audit revealed the truth; political fear prevented action.
Meetings Identified to Cut
12
Meetings Actually Cut
0
Health Outcome
Stress-induced hypertension
Recovery Time
3-month medical leave
An audit you don't act on is worse than no audit. The awareness without the relief is the worst possible state. If you can't authorize yourself to cut meetings, ask your coach or board to do it for you.
Related concepts
Keep connecting.
The concepts that orbit this one — each one sharpens the others.
Beyond the concept
Turn Manager Energy Audit into a live operating decision.
Use this concept as the framing layer, then move into a diagnostic if it maps directly to a current bottleneck.
Typical response time: 24h · No retainer required
Turn Manager Energy Audit into a live operating decision.
Use Manager Energy Audit as the framing layer, then move into diagnostics or advisory if this maps directly to a current business bottleneck.