If you’re leading a research program, you’ve likely mastered a complex calendar. You block time for meetings with team members, protect hours for writing, and manage lots of day-to-day admin. But what happens when you sit down during that writing block and find you simply can’t focus? Or when a day packed with back-to-back meetings leaves you feeling drained, even if you “stayed on schedule”?

This is a signal that managing time is only half the battle. The other finite resource is your mental and creative energy.

The relentless demands of a research leader, from strategic grant writing to detailed manuscript reviews, attentive mentoring, and operational admin, draw from different wells of energy. Trying to power through them all with the same approach can lead to burnout and diminishing returns. The key to sustainable leadership is to shift from simply scheduling your time to intentionally allocating your energy.

This framework extends beyond time management to energy stewardship, enabling you to align your tasks with your available capacity.

The PI Energy Matrix: A Lens for Your Workload

If you’ve done any work on time management, you’re probably familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, built on task urgency and importance. This represents that not all work is created equal, and it’s a great tool for helping prioritize tasks. We also encourage investigators to adapt this model into their own frameworks to capture other dimensions. For example, you can use a 4-quadrant system to assess activities by Time and Energy (e.g., shorter to longer time and draining to energizing) or by Cognitive Demand (from low to high) and Strategic Impact (from low to high). Plotting your responsibilities in these ways can reveal important insights to guide how you approach them.

Let’s break down how activities might appear in the four quadrants for Cognitive Demand vs Strategic Impact:

Quadrant 1: High Impact, High Demand (The Strategic Engine)

• Example Activities: Crafting the framework of a new grant proposal. Interpreting complex data to form a narrative. Designing a long-term research vision.

• Energy Profile: These tasks require deep, uninterrupted focus and peak creativity. They are the engines of your program’s growth, but are highly susceptible to interruption and fatigue.

• Your Role: Architect. This is where you build the future.

Quadrant 2: High Impact, Lower Demand (The Leadership Lever)

• Example Activities: Mentoring a team member on their career path. Building key collaborations. High-level project oversight.

• Energy Profile: These activities are often relational and strategic. They can be energizing and reinforce your vision, but they require emotional presence and clear communication.

• Your Role: Coach and Connector. This is where you multiply your impact through others.

Quadrant 3: Lower Impact, High Demand (The Grind)

• Example Activities: Formatting a manuscript for submission. Navigating complex procurement systems. Filling out reimbursement forms.

• Energy Profile: These tasks are detail-oriented, often bureaucratic, and can be mentally draining due to their friction and low reward. They are prime candidates for systemization or delegation.

• Your Role: Reviewer and Approver. Your goal here is efficiency, not perfection.

Quadrant 4: Lower Impact, Lower Demand (The Noise)

• Example Activities: Sorting through non-urgent emails. Attending meetings with no clear agenda (could have been an email) or relevance to your core goals.

• Energy Profile: These activities are fragmentation. They consume small bits of time and attention, pulling you away from high-impact work without providing any real value.

• Your Role: Eliminator. This is about creating boundaries.

From Insight to Action: Allocating Your Energy, Not Just Your Time

Seeing your work through this matrix allows you to make intentional choices. While the activities in each quadrant will be unique to each individual, once the activities are plotted, here’s how to approach them:

1. Schedule for Your Energy Peaks, Not Just for Availability.
   Your best, most creative thinking happens at specific times of the day. Guard this peak period fiercely for Quadrant 1 work. Do not let meetings, email, or Quadrant 3 tasks invade this space. Schedule demanding creative work when your energy is high, and save procedural tasks for your lower-energy lulls.

2. Batch the “Grind” to Contain Its Draining Effects.
   Quadrant 3 tasks are inevitable. Instead of letting them intrude throughout your day, which constantly pulls you out of a deep focus state, batch them. Designate a specific, limited time block (e.g., Tuesday and Thursday from 2-3 PM) to power through as many as possible. This contains their energy-draining effect and frees up the rest of your schedule.

3. Use “The 5-Minute Rule” to Tame the “Noise.”
   For Quadrant 4, be ruthless. If a task emerges that is low-impact and can be done in five minutes or less, do it immediately to get it off your mind. If it takes longer and isn’t critical, schedule it for your batched admin time or, better yet, decline it. Ask, “What is the consequence of not doing this?” Often, you’ll find it can be eliminated entirely.

4. Leverage “Connection” as a Renewal Source.
   Don’t underestimate the renewing power of Quadrant 2. A good mentoring conversation or a strategic collaboration meeting can be incredibly energizing. When you’re feeling drained from solitary work, sometimes shifting to a connecting, high-impact task can be a more productive break than scrolling through news feeds.

Leading with Sustainable Energy

The goal of this framework is not to add another layer of personal productivity. It’s to help you protect the creative and strategic energy that is the lifeblood of your research program. By aligning your tasks with your natural capacity, you move from a state of reactive exhaustion to one of proactive leadership.

This week, try mapping just one day’s tasks onto the matrix. You might be surprised by the clarity it brings—and the energy it saves.