Energy accounting: how to plan a workday around your real capacity

Energy accounting means treating each day as a budget. Notice what drains you and what refills you, then plan less than you think you can carry. A notebook works for most people. Use a kitchen timer to protect breaks. On a Mac, Dayflow can add an automatic record of your screen, so you can check your log against what actually happened instead of relying on memory.

It is 2:40 in the afternoon. Your calendar says the rest of the day is free, and your to-do list still has the report you meant to start this morning. You open the document, read the first line three times, and then find yourself refilling water, checking messages, and reorganizing a folder that did not need it. Nothing is stopping you. You just have nothing left.

The next morning you feel bad about it, so you plan an even bigger day to catch up. By lunch you are already behind. This loop is common, and it usually has nothing to do with willpower. You are planning with hours when the thing that actually runs out is energy.

This guide covers energy accounting, a simple way to plan a workday around what you can actually carry. You will find the plain reasons days go sideways, six things to try (most need only paper and a timer), and an honest note on where an automatic record of your day helps and where it does not. A quick disclosure up front: this article is published by Dayflow, a Mac app we make, and it appears in one section near the end.

The short version

• Treat energy like a budget. Give tasks a rough cost from 1 to 3, and plan a day that adds up to less than your full budget.
• For one week, write down what drained you and what refilled you, with a single line each. Guesses are fine. Patterns matter more than precision.
• Put your most expensive work in the part of the day when you usually have the most in the tank.
• Count switching between tasks as a cost. Fewer, longer blocks often cost less than many short ones.
• Schedule refills the way you schedule meetings, and protect them with a kitchen timer.
• Keep a short list of tasks you can do on empty, so a low afternoon still moves something forward.

Why does a free afternoon still feel impossible?

A calendar shows time, not capacity. Two hours of open space look identical on screen whether you slept well and had a quiet morning, or spent four hours in calls and a tense conversation with a client. The second version has much less in it, and the calendar has no way to tell you that.

A few things tend to drain energy without leaving much visible output behind:

• Switching. Every move from email to a document to a chat thread and back has a small restart cost. One switch is nothing. Forty switches in a morning add up.
• Holding things in your head. An unanswered message, a deadline you have not started, or a vague worry keeps running in the background. Many people find this tiring even when they are not actively working on it.
• People-facing time. Meetings, calls and even friendly chats cost more for some people than for others. The cost is real either way.
• Environment. Noise, bright light, an uncomfortable chair, or being interrupted often all wear you down in a way that is easy to underestimate.

There is also a memory problem. At the end of the day it is hard to say where the time and energy went. You remember the big moments and lose the small ones, which are often the expensive part. If you have ever finished a day and genuinely could not say what happened to the afternoon, our guide on where did my day go walks through that feeling in more detail.

And many people, including many people with ADHD, have a loose sense of how long things take. If you are curious how your own sense of time compares with a clock, the time estimation test is a short exercise. It is not a diagnostic, just a mirror.

None of this means you are lazy or broken. It means the plan was built on the wrong unit.

Try this: keep a drain and refill log for one week

What to do. Take a notebook or an index card. Draw a line down the middle. Label the left side “drained” and the right side “refilled.” Three or four times a day, at lunch, mid-afternoon and the end of work, write one short line on each side. Write what happened, not how you should have felt about it.

If you want a structure, the daily work log template gives you a simple page to fill in. A blank card works just as well.

An illustration. A Tuesday card might read:

• Drained: standup ran long, two client emails with bad news, open-plan office was loud after 2.
• Refilled: walk to get coffee, 40 quiet minutes on the design draft, lunch away from the desk.

How to tell after a week. Read all seven cards in one sitting. You are looking for repeats. If “loud office” or “back-to-back calls” shows up on four of five workdays, that is a real drain worth planning around. If the log feels like a chore you keep forgetting, shrink it to one line at the end of the day. A smaller log you actually keep beats a detailed one you abandon on Wednesday.

Try this: give the day a budget, not a schedule

What to do. Pick a number for a normal day’s budget. Ten points is easy to work with. Give each task a rough cost: 1 for light work, 2 for moderate, 3 for heavy. Then plan tasks that add up to about 7, not 10. The leftover is for surprises, and there are always surprises.

Your budget changes. After a bad night, a long commute or a difficult day yesterday, start the morning with a smaller number. That is not cheating. It is accurate.

An illustration. Say your budget is 10 points and you plan:

Task	Cost
Write first draft of proposal	3
Weekly team call	2
Answer routine email	1
Update project tracker	1
Total planned	7

When a colleague asks for a “quick” review at 3 p.m., you have room for it. Without the buffer, that review is what tips the day over.

How to tell after a week. Compare how many planned tasks you finished this week with a normal week. A good sign is not finishing more. It is ending more days with something left, and fewer evenings spent feeling guilty about an unfinished list. If you are hitting all 7 points with energy to spare every day, raise the plan by one. If you keep missing, lower it. For a broader sense of where the hours themselves go, the where does my week go calculator gives you a quick rough breakdown to compare with your log.

Try this: put the expensive work where your energy is

What to do. Look at your drain and refill log, or just think back over the last few weeks, and find the part of the day when you usually have the most in the tank. For some people it is the first two hours. For others it is late morning, or after lunch and a walk. Put your 3-point tasks there and guard that window. Move email, admin and routine updates to the times when you tend to be lower.

An illustration. Someone who feels clear between 9 and 11 but foggy after 2 might move their weekly call from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and write in the morning instead. The call costs the same either way. The writing costs much less when it happens in the good window.

How to tell after a week. Notice whether the heavy task actually got started on more days. Starting is often the hardest part, and it usually gets easier when the task lands in a good window. If you cannot move meetings, try protecting even one hour of your best time three days a week. That still tells you something.

Try this: price in the switches

What to do. Every time you change what you are working on, count it as a small cost, maybe half a point. Then group similar tasks together. Answer email in two or three batches instead of whenever a notification appears. Put meetings next to each other rather than scattering them across the day, if your role allows it.

When you must switch, leave yourself a note. One line in the document you are leaving, such as “next: fix the second table, then email Sam,” makes coming back much cheaper.

An illustration. A morning with a document, a chat thread, two inboxes and a spreadsheet, visited in turns every ten minutes, might cost more than a morning of two long blocks with one break in between, even if the total work is similar. Writing “switch” each time you change tasks for a single morning can be eye-opening.

How to tell after a week. Ask yourself at the end of each day whether you feel less scattered. You can also count: if you tally switches for one morning at the start of the week and one at the end, a lower number with the same amount done is a good sign.

Try this: schedule refills like meetings

What to do. Look at the “refilled” side of your log and pick two or three things that reliably help. A short walk, eating away from the desk, ten minutes outside, a stretch, a quiet room. Put them in your calendar as real blocks. Then use a kitchen timer, not your phone, to protect them. Set it, step away, and come back when it rings.

A physical timer helps because it does not come with notifications, and it is visible. You know exactly how much break you have left.

An illustration. A plan might include a 15-minute walk at 11:30 and a 10-minute screen break at 3. On a busy day, the walk shrinks to a lap of the building, but it still happens.

How to tell after a week. Check whether the afternoons feel a little less steep. You may notice that the mid-afternoon slump hits later, or that you recover from it faster. If you skip the refills on most days, they are probably scheduled at the wrong time. Move them to just before your usual crash rather than after it.

Try this: keep a low-energy menu

What to do. Write a short list of tasks that genuinely move work forward but need very little from you. Filing, renaming files, updating a tracker, replying to simple messages, tidying notes, booking things. Keep the list somewhere you can see it.

When you hit empty, you do not have to choose between pushing through a heavy task and doing nothing. You pick something off the menu.

An illustration. A writer’s low-energy menu might say: format references, reply to two scheduling emails, rename draft files, add tomorrow’s first task to the top of the document. None of it is the hard part. All of it makes the hard part a little easier next time.

How to tell after a week. Notice how you feel about low afternoons. If they shift from “wasted” to “slow but useful,” the menu is working. You can also ask a friend or colleague to check in briefly on Friday: what did the slow afternoons produce this week? Saying it out loud to someone else often shows more progress than you would credit yourself with.

Where seeing your actual day helps

Every step above depends on remembering what happened. That is the weak point. At 6 p.m. it is hard to recall whether the afternoon went to the report or to forty small switches.

An automatic record removes the remembering part. Dayflow is a free, open-source Mac app that records your screen at one frame every 10 seconds and has AI write the day into a readable timeline. You do not start a timer. At the end of the day you can read the timeline next to your drain and refill notes and see whether “worked on the proposal all afternoon” matches what was on screen.

The details, based on Dayflow’s own documentation as reviewed in September 2026 for version 2.2.0:

• It is $0 and MIT licensed. An optional Pro plan is $20 a month.
• It runs on macOS 14 or later.
• Recordings and the local timeline are stored on your Mac. With Local AI, screenshot analysis stays on-device. With your own cloud provider or Dayflow Pro, selected screenshots are processed off-device. Under the privacy policy, Pro deletes screenshots after processing. More in local and cloud processing.
• You can export a date range as Markdown from Settings, then Export.
• AI summaries can miss or misinterpret work, so check them before relying on them.

If you want to compare options, our guide to Mac time trackers covers the category. Dayflow publishes this article.

Where Dayflow is the wrong pick

Be direct with yourself about what a screen record can and cannot do for energy accounting.

• It cannot see how you feel. The whole method rests on noticing drain and refill. Dayflow only sees your screen. The notebook does the important part, and it beats Dayflow at it.
• It is Mac only. If your work happens mostly on a Windows PC, a phone or away from a computer, paper is the better tool.
• It sees only the screen. Meetings in a room, phone calls, a long commute and a hard conversation in the hallway do not show up, and those are often the biggest drains.
• It does not plan your day. It will not set a budget, price tasks, or tell you what to do next.
• It is not a blocker. It does not provide website blocking. If you need a hard stop on certain sites, use a dedicated blocking tool.
• It is a record, not a coach or a treatment. It is a general tool that some people find useful for remembering their day. It does not address ADHD, burnout or anything else.
• It does not handle work admin. There are no invoices, payroll approvals or team reports.

If you already know where your day goes and the trouble is pacing yourself, skip software and keep the notebook. For a closer look at the time-blindness side of this, see our piece on time blindness apps.

When to get more help

This article is not medical advice. Energy accounting is a planning habit, and it can make ordinary days easier, but it is not a fix for exhaustion that does not lift with rest.

If you are tired most days no matter how you plan, if focus or mood problems are affecting your work or relationships, or if you think ADHD, burnout, anxiety, depression or a sleep problem might be involved, talk to a doctor or a licensed clinician. They are the right people for diagnosis and treatment. No notebook, timer or app replaces that.

The bottom line

Your day runs on energy, and the calendar only shows hours. Start by writing one line a day about what drained you and what refilled you. Give tasks rough costs, plan less than your full budget, put the heavy work in your best window, and protect your breaks with a kitchen timer. Keep a short menu for empty afternoons.

Most of this needs nothing but paper. If you work on a Mac and keep losing track of what actually happened, an automatic record can fill in the memory gaps. But the record is the optional part. The planning habit is what makes the difference, and you can start it today with an index card.

Frequently asked questions

What is energy accounting?

Energy accounting is a way of planning a day around how much you can actually do, not how many hours are open. You treat energy like a budget. Activities that cost you get a rough price, activities that restore you count as deposits, and you try to end the day without going into debt. Many people do it with nothing more than a notebook and a few honest notes each evening.

Is energy accounting the same as spoon theory?

They are related ideas. Both treat daily capacity as limited and spent by activities. Spoon theory is mostly a way to describe and explain limited energy to other people. Energy accounting adds a planning habit: you note what drains and what refills you, give tasks rough costs, and plan your day against a budget. Plenty of people use the language of one and the habits of the other.

How do I figure out how much energy a task costs?

Guess first, then check. Give each task a rough cost from 1 to 3 before you start, and after it ends, write down how you actually feel. After a week of notes, patterns usually show up: certain calls, certain kinds of writing, or certain times of day cost more than you expected. Adjust the prices to match what you saw, not what you think should be true.

Can energy accounting help people with ADHD plan their day?

Many people with ADHD find a budget easier to work with than a strict hourly schedule, because it leaves room for days that run differently. It is a planning habit, not a treatment, and it does not replace care from a doctor or licensed clinician. If low energy, focus, or mood problems are affecting your work or life, talk to a professional about what is going on.

Why am I exhausted after a day where I did not get much done?

Visible output and energy spent are not the same thing. Switching between tasks, waiting on replies, sitting in meetings, holding worries, and pushing through noise or interruptions all cost energy without producing anything you can point to. Writing down those hidden costs, including transitions and recovery time, often explains why a day that looked light on paper left you completely drained by the evening.

Is a paper planner better than an app for energy accounting?

For the planning itself, often yes. A notebook or index card is faster to start, works away from the screen, and captures how you felt, which no screen recorder can see. Dayflow does not plan your day or score your energy. It only keeps a record of what was on your Mac screen. Paper is the better choice for the budget. An automatic record is an optional extra for checking your memory.

Does Dayflow block distracting websites or apps?

No. Dayflow does not provide website blocking, invoicing, or payroll approvals. It records your Mac screen at one frame every 10 seconds and uses AI to write a readable timeline of your day. If what you need is a hard stop on certain sites during focus time, you will want a dedicated blocking tool alongside or instead of Dayflow.

Does Dayflow cost anything and does it work on Windows?

Dayflow is $0 and MIT licensed, with an optional Pro plan at $20 a month that manages cloud analysis. It runs only on macOS 14 or later, so there is no Windows, Linux, iPhone, or Android version. If you work mainly on another platform, a paper log or a tool built for that platform will serve you better.

How long before energy accounting starts to work?

Give it about a week of honest notes before judging it. The first few days mostly show you where your guesses were wrong. By the end of a week you usually have enough to spot one or two big drains and one reliable refill, which is enough to plan the next week a little more kindly. Small adjustments matter more than a perfect system.