I am beginning to believe this is a dangerously misleading analogy because what we describe as energy in productivity terms is definitely not a resource that is depleted and refilled, but something that behaves very differently.
For example, lets say you are in a productivity slump but then a few nice words from customer turns it all around, you feel full of energy and motivation and crush your work with enthusiasm. The customer has not handed over a resource, instead, their words have changed ideas in your head. The ideas in your head are dictating whether you feel full of energy or in a slump, not a quantity that follows the rules of conservation.
An example of a different analogy that conflicts with the battery version is to describe energy/motivation as a fly-wheel. If your don't put enough energy in, it will stall and all energy you put in is lost. However get it up to speed and it can be self-sustaining - you seem to get more out of it than you put in. I find that more interesting than the battery but its also pretty weak.
Addressing the true causes of productivity requires understanding how our thoughts lead to feelings of energy and motivation. The battery analogy is tempting because it is easy to understand and makes the problem seem tractable but its actually disguising and hiding the hard problem.
According to psychologist Jordan Peterson, moving towards a goal that you value while seeing things working out during the journey is what produces positive emotions. Positive emotions are not a result of attaining things. Infact there is evidence that people sometimes get depressed once they reach the destination.
I can have a lot of energy, but be totally unproductive. Good example are students, who (usually) don't have as much obligations as work force people and procrastinate a lot. There's is joke they're going to do everything except studying - mostly because anxiety of studying for exams creates somewhat mental barrier that in turns into perception that studying takes much more energy than it actually will.
On the other hand - one can have almost no energy and still be productive (have you ever worked so hard, that you fallen asleep 10 minutes after you'd finished?).
Obviously, battery analogy is not 100% true, because humans don't really have a full/empty condition. You can borrow your energy almost ad infinitum to the moment that you're going to experience burnout and heavy depression. And even then people can still get some energy in crisis situations. As always when talking about people's psyche there are a lot of conditions and baggage to discuss, yet, on basic level battery analogy usually works fine.
You need to be aware of your energy and need to take care of yourself. Both physically and mentally.
I think energy in this context is often used to mean "enthusiasm" or "motivation". Its the energy that can be applied in a desired direction - a combination of actual gas in the tank as well as a panoply of psychological factors.
> You can borrow your energy almost ad infinitum to the moment that > you're going to experience burnout and heavy depression
Sama says something quite interesting here that indicates the psychological rather than the energy aspect of burn-out. He believes its impossible to burn-out if you are experiencing success. I think there is truth there, failure to progress and dis-satisfaction is a common feature in burnout cases. I suspect burnout is often a protection mechanism to get us to stop a behaviour rather than an actual state of energy depletion. Its a bit like the growing evidence for psychosomatic backpain occurring in response to psychological not physical factors.
For that particular pairing, it might be self-esteem, how the individual handles other people's perception of themselves etc. If they can get a handle on the real causes, they can then build techniques to use SM without it being a drain and extract more benefits.
The reason I think its important and not just an optimisation is that one day, the gym might stop being positive. When the positives stop working, you then have a limited time window to fix the situation before you enter a downward spiral. IMHO better to get your hands on the real tools earlier.
Doing "social stuff" might not be a requirement for success (for certain values of success), but it can make a lot of things in life a lot easier. To the extent you believe this to be true for you, the rational approach then is to figure out how you can get the energy you need to do the social stuff you want to, and make sure you only do those things.
Yet a lot of people don't recognize how huge energy spend is for introverts to actually write stuff (which is actually with most of the things because we, as humans, are very egocentric).
This expenditure is not a "point-in-time" purchase, especially - if it comes to social sharing. Pressing is one thing, but then one have to deal with feedback or even the lack of it. This is continuously expending the energy and can make a person severely unhappy even a weeks after piece had been shared. There are major internet personalities, with hundred thousands if not millions of followers on social networks that couldn't handle negative feedback from fraction of their fanbase, even though they decided they want to live such lifestyle. Imagine what negative feedback can do to a person that don't want (internally) do this in the first place.
I talk with a lot of people in IT field. Quite a bit of them don't really want to share but they feel pressurized by both common media and some of their extrovert peers. I always reassure them, that - while everything on the internet looks like you need to share or die - I know a lot of people who made stellar careers while dealing with social stuff only through hired PR teams or not at all.
On the other hand Email, Twitter and similar are quite draining and only do that when I really need to. So even "socializing" can be quite divided and mean different things for different people.
I think that the way we spend our time is also mostly personality-dependent. Maybe that explains why given ten minutes spare, some people do a bit of MOOC, and others play candy crush or just stare and fidget ... it’s a way of giving the mind a bit of a break!
Every thing that you do is going to leave you with either energy gain or loss. The idea is to either sustain energy level or spend what you have then gain it - just like charging a battery.
Tricky part is doing things that give you energy gain. One thing might be very exhausting in the evening, but give you a lot of energy in the morning. It achanges with setting and context as well (for example after 10 days of constant socializing you might want to be left in solitude for a few days, or after spending week in solitude you might crave for social interaction).
So, a lot of things you’re seeing online are people for which professional socializing is an energy gain. After full day of work (or even during work break) they get an energy boost from sharing, answering and attending conferences.
This isn’t for everyone - though. It might be that for you doing stuff like this is actually energy loss. If you’re expending your energy throughout the day and at the end you need to spend bit more to write a blog post or prepare for the conference you are going to subconsciously push it away from you making an illusion of “not getting enough time of doing it”.
In concrete scenario imagine situation where a person has exactly 10 minutes (of non-allocated) time (let’s say wait for doctor appoinment). One person is going to open a game on their phone, other is going to browse the news, someone else is going to open a laptop and write 5-6 lines of code for the stuff they are building and other is going to browse stackoverflow. Such timeslot isn’t usually planned, but it builds the result from small blocks and (usually) is following "energy gain" or at least not a energy gain.
(Note: even if for someone doing social stuff is constant energy loss there is no reason to fret. It’s not really a requierement: while you aren’t going to be internet famous you can still earn a very decent living without having to take part in professional/non-professional social networks).