Energy · 5 min
“Can you give me a hack to make the stress go away so I can get more done?”
You have rolled out every hack from your downloaded cheat sheets and the self-help books on the shelf. The overwhelm and the tiredness are still there. And now you are blaming yourself. What then?
As a founder, an entrepreneur or a leader in a startup or scale-up, most of us recognise this. I would bet you have tried a great many things, hacks and strategies to fix it and get on with getting more done — and to be “high performing”, which is the holy grail of almost all leadership literature.
For me it became an obsession: constantly checking whether I was in my optimal performance zone. You can easily argue that focusing on performance is a good thing. We tend to succeed at what we put our attention on.
The downside was a growing sense of guilt and self-blame every time I was not in the zone. An inner commentary chasing answers: what is wrong, what have I changed, why can I not push right now, why is my energy suddenly low, I ought to be able to do this, it makes no sense that it is going so slowly, I have not even put that many hours in this week.
The traditional route
What would the performance-oriented approach suggest? Seeing you as an engine that needs tuning. So we map the week, look for better organisation, introduce pomodoro, zero inbox, eat-the-frog, the five-second rule, time blocking, stop multitasking, the Eisenhower matrix, the two-minute rule, GTD, kanban. The list goes on.
The problem is the assumption underneath all of it: that it is you who needs fixing. Implicitly it means we do not accept the status quo and the exhaustion you feel, but fight it with clever moves to get back into the zone. And for those of us who are entrepreneurs and founders, it is precisely not accepting the status quo that has served us so well when we built companies. It is a large part of why others look up to us. So it is not the least bit strange that we do not accept this state either.
Let me be clear: I am not against any of those hacks or techniques. I find them powerful and useful, and I use them regularly in my daily work. The problem arises when the approach to overload and mental fatigue becomes single-track: let us find a new productivity hack, implement it, and get back to high performance.
A side story about running
I love metaphors. They make it easier to see the value of another perspective. Running is my favourite sport, orienteering especially, and my ambition is to get better at navigating — and faster. So I asked our instructor: how do I get faster? He answered, “If you want to run faster, you need to practise running fast.”
I felt stupid for not having seen it myself, but loved the obvious logic. And as someone fond of cars and engines, I thought: of course, a Formula 1 car also has to run at maximum if it is going to win. So off I went happily into the forest, warmed up and pushed. And pushed.
What happened next surprised me. After a while of consistent training I did not get faster. I got hungrier after the runs, my legs were heavy and sore, and my body had a general low energy and discomfort. But I kept going, because I was certain it was just a phase I had to get through before landing at a higher level.
Meanwhile my runs had become conversations with myself: why am I not getting faster, why are my legs tired, what is that pain in my hip? At home I read articles on the subject, checked my shoes, saw a physiotherapist, drank more water and added electrolytes. No real change. Now I got properly frustrated — and a little afraid. “I am 45, maybe age is catching up with me. I will never run pain-free and fast again.”
Which internal regime are you running?
Today I would look at it differently. I would ask: what is the human context of this?
Start with the timeline. How long have you felt like this consistently — days, weeks, months? The answer points to whether you have a planning problem or a regime problem.
And then ask: are you running yourself like a factory floor producing commoditised goods, or like a highly specialised creative studio? The factory floor measures output per hour and assumes more pressure gives more production. The studio knows that the work comes in waves, that breaks are part of the production, and that quality falls long before the hours do.
Filling in the human context
Human Context means remembering and filling in the human context of what you are experiencing. It is the recognition that it is not a machine or an engine you are trying to optimise — and that a factory-floor regime does not help you in this situation. I would go further and claim it only creates more suffering.
Have you noticed what happens when you accept something as a condition rather than a problem? A quite different kind of creativity tends to show up.
So try this, if you are in doubt: spend a week not trying to fix your energy, but mapping it. When are your best hours? What drains, and what recharges? Then lay out the next week according to what you find — instead of according to what the calendar thinks. I would like to hear what you discovered.