I’ve had some conversations lately with folks who are feeling stuck and not sure how to move forward. They are getting great feedback from their peers and their boss, and yet they are still feeling exhausted and unable to see a future in which they’re not feeling this way. They might think that they’re flirting with burnout, or are already there.

One of the ways that I have found helps me when I’m in this situation and need to get unstuck is to consider how I am feeling. At the end of my day, do I feel energized or depleted?

The book Designing Your Life outlines a great exercise where you deeply consider how you’re spending your time and how those activities impact your energy. In short, evaluate your calendar. For each meeting or other event that you have on your calendar, think about how you feel before, during, and after it. Some meetings give you energy, while others sap it. Additionally, how you feel about what you’re doing can be impacted by the time of day, your physical body, the seasons, and more. Analyzing what augments your energy and what depletes your energy can help you identify trends that you can then use to help you better manage how you feel overall.

You can complete this exercise by simply doing a retrospective at the end of the day. If that doesn’t feel sufficient, or you think that you need a higher level of granularity, you can do it on a meeting-by-meeting basis instead. If you’d like some more guidance in completing this exercise, the Designing Your Life Workbook walks you through it and all of the other exercises in the book.

For example, if you know you’re not a morning person (hi, that’s me!), you can work to schedule meetings where you need to be fully engaged and in the best possible mood for later in the day. If you realize that there’s a meeting that you dread every week, you can consider whether you might be able to make changes to the meeting itself to make it less dreadful. Alternatively, if you can’t make changes to that meeting, you can brainstorm ways to do things around that meeting so that it’s not combining with other energy-draining meetings or activities. Perhaps you can schedule a meeting that gives you energy immediately before or after it to mitigate its impact. Or maybe that’s the day that you make sure that you go to the gym and burn off your frustration on the treadmill. I have a close friend who struggles in the winter, so they put extra attention on activities that give them energy like planning upcoming milestones.

Overall, this exercise is one in self-awareness. This is information that you can use to better manage yourself and how you spend your time. You can use this information to structure experiments for yourself to help you feel better about the work that you’re doing. You can experiment with new goals that will help you grow. You can set yourself up so that you have many activities that augment your energy. You will probably never get to fully do away with the activities that deplete your energy, but you can learn how to manage that so that you don’t become overwhelmed.

If you find that your time is being disproportionately spent on activities that drain your energy, or that you’re so overwhelmed that everything feels like it is sapping your energy, you might realize that you need to make a bigger change. You might already be burnt out and need to take some time off to start to address that. You might need to find a great coach or therapist to help you find your way through. You could realize that maybe you don’t love your current role even if you’re doing a good job at it. You could learn that, while you have a great team and company, the role you’re in doesn’t give you the growth that you need right now.

Discovering what gives you energy and what depletes your energy gives you better knowledge so that you can move forward from feeling stuck today. In the future, knowing this might help you from getting stuck in the first place.