Most founders I talk to think they can solve all of their problems by optimizing their time, but rarely do they focus on their energy.
What the research tells us
Time is fixed, we all get the same hours, but energy goes up and down and it can actually be rebuilt. Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy made this case in Harvard Business Review years ago, arguing that leaders get more done by renewing their energy than by stretching their hours, and they break energy into four parts: physical, emotional, mental, and a sense of purpose (Schwartz & McCarthy, 2007).
Organizational researchers have since started treating energy as a real resource that gets used up and topped up over the course of a day, and people tend to do their best work when they're replenishing it regularly rather than white-knuckling through (Quinn et al., 2012).
The Job Demands-Resources model is probably the clearest explanation I've found for why founders burn out. When the demands on you stay high and the things that refill you stay low, you end up exhausted, but when your resources keep pace those same demands can actually feel energizing (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). Founders are never short on demands. What's usually missing is any kind of real plan for the resource side.
Shift 1: From sleep as optional - to sleep as strategy
I personally spent many years thinking that waking up earlier was the key to getting more done. I learned the hard way that sleep is what fuels your self-control - the thing that keeps you patient and thinking clearly so you don’t snap or make a call you'll regret later (Barnes, 2012).
There's one study I keep coming back to with CEOs. On days when leaders had slept badly they were more likely to act in abusive ways toward their team, and their team's engagement dropped that same day (Barnes et al., 2015). So your sleep isn't only about you, it quietly sets the tone for everyone who reports to you.
Shift 2: From always-on to real recovery
Being away from your desk isn't the same thing as recovering, which is something I have to remind myself of too. If you're answering Slack from the sidelines of your kid's game, your body might be off work but your head definitely isn't.
Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz looked at what actually restores people after work and landed on four things: mentally detaching from the job, relaxing, doing something unrelated where you're learning or getting better at it, and having some control over your own time (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). Detaching seems to matter most, and it's also the one founders find hardest, which probably isn't a coincidence.
Let’s be clear. Recovery is not the same as rest. Or self care. Or another vacation. Recovery is intentional. It isn’t stepping away and then coming back to bigger problems. Recovery is a strategic practice.
Shift 3: From reacting all day to protecting your focus
A founder's day can easily turn into one long string of interruptions, a quick question here and a call there and some fire before lunch, and each one feels small enough not to matter, but they add up and by five o'clock the tank is empty and you're not totally sure why.
Sophie Leroy's research helps explain it. When you switch from one task to another, part of your attention stays stuck on the thing you just left, which she calls attention residue, and it drags down how well you do whatever comes next (Leroy, 2009). Another study found that people who get interrupted a lot actually work faster to make up for it, but they also report more stress and frustration and feel like everything takes more effort (Mark et al., 2008).
This one is about structure more than willpower. If you protect a block of your best hours for the thinking only you can do, and send routine questions to the people who own them, you'll probably notice you have a lot more left in you at the end of the day.
Shift 4: Know what drains you and what fuels you
Not all work costs the same amount of energy. An hour on a hard problem you love can leave you buzzing, while an hour on something you've been dreading can wipe out your whole afternoon, and most founders never really track that difference, so they keep doing the draining stuff just because they happen to be good at it.
People matter as much as tasks do. Rob Cross and his colleagues found that some relationships at work reliably energize us and others drain us, and that the people who energize others also tend to be the higher performers everyone wants to work with (Cross et al., 2003).
This is where an energy audit comes in, which sounds fancier than it is. You look back at your week and sort it into what gave you energy, what took it, and what was kind of neutral, and then you start shaping your role around the work that fuels you and handing off or automating or just stopping the rest. It's really the same delegation conversation every scaling founder has to have, just from a different angle.
Where to start
You don't need to overhaul your whole life to start, and honestly if you try to change everything at once it usually doesn't stick. Start small.
This week: Try a really simple energy audit. At the end of each day, write down the one thing that gave you the most energy and the one thing that drained you the most, that's it.
This month: Pick your biggest drain and do something about it, whether that's delegating it, batching it, or dropping it altogether. Protect one block of focus time a week too, and guard your sleep the way you'd guard an investor meeting.
This quarter: Find one recovery practice that actually switches you off, exercise or time outside or a hobby that has nothing to do with work, and put it in your calendar so it survives the busy weeks (because there will be busy weeks).
This year: Start reshaping your role around what fuels you, so your leadership team owns more of the work that drains you and the company doesn't need you running on empty just to function.
You don't have to do this alone
The founders I've seen keep their energy up over the long haul almost never do it on their own. Social support is one of the strongest buffers against stress that psychology has found (Cohen & Wills, 1985), and whether that looks like a coach or a group of other founders or just a few people who really get it, having that support is part of the system, not a nice-to-have.
At Built Performance I work with founders, entrepreneurs and business owners over the long term, and a lot of that work is figuring out together where your energy is actually going, what's draining it, and how to build a company and a role you can keep up for years and not just the next few months.
If you've been running on empty, let's talk.
References
Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands-Resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328.
Barnes, C. M. (2012). Working in our sleep: Sleep and self-regulation in organizations. Organizational Psychology Review, 2(3), 234–257.
Barnes, C. M., Lucianetti, L., Bhave, D. P., & Christian, M. S. (2015). "You wouldn't like me when I'm sleepy": Leaders' sleep, daily abusive supervision, and work unit engagement. Academy of Management Journal, 58(5), 1419–1437.
Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310–357.
Cross, R., Baker, W., & Parker, A. (2003). What creates energy in organizations? MIT Sloan Management Review, 44(4), 51–56.
Good, D. J., Lyddy, C. J., Glomb, T. M., Bono, J. E., Brown, K. W., Duffy, M. K., Baer, R. A., Brewer, J. A., & Lazar, S. W. (2016). Contemplating mindfulness at work: An integrative review. Journal of Management, 42(1), 114–142.
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181.
Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107–110.
Quinn, R. W., Spreitzer, G. M., & Lam, C. F. (2012). Building a sustainable model of human energy in organizations: Exploring the critical role of resources. Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 337–396.
Schwartz, T., & McCarthy, C. (2007). Manage your energy, not your time. Harvard Business Review, 85(10), 63–73.
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221.
