Energy Audit  

The Energy Audit (or Enjoyment Audit) can be useful in coaching and for self-assessing your productivity and happiness with your work. This is a great tool for insuring against burnout. An Energy Audit can be useful in discovering the “highest and best use of your time”, and then thinking about what types of work you are doing that might be best for you to delegate to other people on your team. If gives/takes energy doesn’t resonate with you, you can think of this dimension as “enjoy” and “don’t enjoy”. 

To use this tool, you would first add a card with every type of task work that you do. Then, you will rank the task according to the two dimensions from -5 (takes a lot of energy, or really bad at) to 0 (neutral) to +5 (gives a lot of energy or really good at).  You might want to think about each dimension separately, placing each card initially along one axis, and then moving them into the right number of the other axis once you have all the cards placed on either the energy or capability axis.

We recommend less than 25% of your tasks should be within the “good at, don’t enjoy/no energy” quadrant and 0% should be in the “bad at, takes energy” quadrant. Meaning 75% or more should be in the gives energy half. By looking to delegation to align your graph with this ideal, you will be less likely to become burnt out at work.

Use the multi-select tool (hold down shift key and then click or draw a box around multiple cards) and the left card menu in order to delete the sample cards that are.    

Cardsmith Pro-tip: Use the Zoom Slider Bar to make the background image larger or smaller in order to fit your screen.