Accounting Energy: The Four Accounts Behind Fluctuating Energy

Why Planning Fails When Energy Fluctuates

Have you heard of the myth? The phases of energy Are cyclic like the moon. It is often seen as a coin With only two sides — Currency and crude. But what if I said Energy has four sides? Four accounts that shape What your day could look like. Welcome to spoonie life. Where planning is a gamble. Energy doesn’t behave. No tutor or finance director — Can predict its gains.

Energy is a currency, one that we constantly pay. Four accounts for one body and one mind.

A heckler retaliates, “How can this be fair?”

The accountant replies, “This is simply the price you bear.”

Have You Meet Mr. Calculo?

In my last post, I spoke about energy as a currency. The rise and drop of that coin is pulled by the strings of our internal system while responding to the world around us.

To me, energy has an accountant — one that is strict and stingy, keeping track of our leaks and reserves. Like a landlord waiting for rent to be due.

When I began looking at energy as something with four sides, I began to see it in two ways: how we spend it, and how its state changes. We’ll get to the latter in the next post.

Although, the way we spend energy already reveals something important. Energy moves through four accounts: one for the body, one for the mind, one for the heart, and one for the senses.

The Four Accounts That We Spend

Our body and mind have four ways in which energy is both depleted and restored. So it isn’t a complete hopeless equation.

The Physical Account The physical account clocks every movement of our day — getting out of bed, frying eggs for breakfast, taking a warm shower. Sometimes these activities can restore our reserves. Other times, especially with chronic pain or flare-ups, they become undeniable drains.

The Cognitive Account The brain that handles it all: decision-making, remembering tasks, context switching, planning, organizing, executive functioning and brainstorming. The mental ledger fills quickly when the brain has to carry too many invoices at once.

The Emotional Account The account where we labor our love. Some activities replenish it, others drain it. Masking, for instance, is a clear withdrawal. A conversation with a loved one might become a deposit. Emotional regulation, social interactions, rejection — they all leave their marks in this account.

The Sensory Account The last account is the most unpredictable. Bright lights, loud noise, traffic, crowded spaces, sudden silence. The sensory world can either soothe or overwhelm, often without warning. Every day we unknowingly withdraw from these four accounts and some days, one of them goes bankrupt before noon.

The Problem With One Sided Planners

Keeping a track of this four-sided currency we call energy while using a one-sided planner simply doesn’t balance the equation.

But does that mean we must abandon our ambitions because our systems are complicated?

Heck No!

Our dreams matter just as much as anyone else’s.

But when energy that fluctuates like the stock market, ambitions can become tricky and a typical planner even trickier.

We push ourselves to do more, climb more stairs, check more boxes. Not because we’re careless with our bodies, but because the systems we use assume our energy behaves the same way every day.

And that’s where the problem begins.

The Typical Planner Runs on Time

The typical planner we love to buy is filled with habits, checklists, and beautiful stickers that tempt our eyes.

For a week, it feels magical.

Then, it turns into a decoration on the shelf, one we forget to check. Because when ambition meets fluctuating energy, planning becomes complicated.

Most planning systems assume something that simply isn’t true for us: that our energy stays the same every day.

Most planners look like this: Wake up → Same energy → Execute → Repeat Our days look more like this: Wake up → Happy → Hyperfocus → Crash → Rest → Comfortable → Check to-do list → Procrastinate → Anxiety → Clean the table → Return to task → Hyperfocus → Small victory → Rest

The typical planner fails because it doesn’t account for our energy levels or the differences in our wiring and fluctuating energy doesn’t only change within a day.

Sometimes it changes across a week. - High focus Tuesday - Foggy Wednesday - Flare Friday

So the trouble isn’t ambition or planning itself. Maybe the problem lies in the assumption behind it. That our energy behaves the same way every day.

Our bodies run on something else entirely. For me, it’s starting to look a lot like batteries, the other four states of energy.

If that’s true, maybe the question isn’t how to force ourselves into rigid planners. It is that planning needs to change.

The Question That Remains

So, we ask ourselves: How do we plan for variability?

That’s the question I’ve been sitting with for weeks and maybe, just maybe, I’m getting closer to understanding how that might work.

Would you be willing to take that leap of faith with me when I arrive at the answer? To experiment with me and my designs.

So that planning can become something playful again, not something purely mathematical.

If you’re curious about what those “four battery sides” of energy look like, that’s where we’re heading in my next post.

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