---
aliases: ["On Founder Energy Management"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-mental-health]]", "[[topic-productivity-systems]]"]
Status: Published
---
# On Founder Energy Management
Most advice about founder productivity focuses on time management. But time is a renewable resource — you get 24 hours every day. Energy isn't.

The founders I know who sustain high output for years are almost universally careful about energy: they protect sleep, have physical activity habits, and are selective about which meetings they take. Not because they're less dedicated, but because they've learned that a fresh 4-hour work block produces more than a tired 10-hour one.

This isn't about self-care as a trend. It's about treating yourself as the primary asset in your company and investing accordingly.

The energy management framework I have converged on after years of experimentation has three tiers. The first is physiological: sleep, exercise, nutrition. These are non-negotiable and should be treated as infrastructure, not luxuries. When I skip a morning ride or sleep less than 7 hours, the impact on my writing quality and decision-making is measurable within the same day. The second tier is cognitive: protecting deep work blocks, batching meetings, eliminating context switching. This is well-understood in theory but hard to execute because other people's urgencies constantly erode your schedule. The third tier is emotional: choosing which relationships and situations to invest emotional energy in, and which to deliberately limit. This is the tier most founders neglect, and it is often the one that causes burnout.

The emotional tier deserves special attention because it is invisible in most productivity discourse. A single difficult conversation with a co-founder, investor, or employee can drain more energy than a full day of deep work. Founders who do not account for this end up mystified about why they are exhausted despite having a "good schedule." The schedule looks fine on paper, but it does not capture the emotional load of managing conflict, making difficult personnel decisions, or absorbing the anxiety of an uncertain fundraise. Acknowledging this cost is the first step to managing it.

Running a content business is less emotionally volatile than running a venture-backed startup, but the energy management principles are identical. The weeks when Refactoring's content is best are always the weeks when I have slept well, exercised, and had enough unstructured time for ideas to develop. The weeks when the content feels forced are always the weeks when I sacrificed recovery for productivity. The correlation is so reliable that I now treat my energy state as a leading indicator of content quality and adjust my schedule accordingly.

## Key insight
Energy, not time, is the binding constraint on founder productivity. Time management without energy management is like optimizing a factory's schedule without maintaining the machines. The most leveraged investments a founder can make are the ones that protect and restore energy: consistent sleep, regular physical activity, emotional boundary-setting, and the discipline to leave margin in the schedule. These investments feel unproductive in the moment but are the foundation on which all productive work depends.

## Related
- [[sleeping-more-is-a-superpower]] — Sleep as the single most important energy management intervention
- [[cycling-teaches-patience]] — Physical activity as both energy management and a metaphor for sustainable pacing
- [[training-load-and-knowledge-work]] — The recovery model from athletics applied to cognitive work
- [[the-two-types-of-hard]] — Distinguishing between genuine difficulty and resistance caused by depleted energy
- [[recovery-week-in-training]] — Periodic recovery as a structural element of sustained performance
