Withstanding The Leadership Grind - Leadership Minute

Leaders must maximize their recovery time to avoid burning out

Leadership can be a brutal slog.

Especially when your team or organization is in a difficult environment—like the one many leaders have been navigating since 2020. When times are tough it can feel difficult to find the energy to meet the demands of the moment.

That’s not to say that leadership is easy when things are going well. There’s an endless series of meetings, requests of your time and decisions that land on your desk because they are too difficult or important to delegate. Add in a grueling travel schedule, and leadership can quickly lead to burnout, a topic I wrote about in a recent Leadership Minute.

This is why leaders must design their workdays and daily routines to prevent burnout and ensure full recovery during downtime. Here are a few practices I recommend, based on my own experience and insights from other high-performing leaders:

Create Buffers

It’s vital to have buffer activities that delineate work time from personal time. I know of leaders who answer emails as soon as they wake up and work right up until they fall asleep at night. While these people are putting in hours for sure, they are sacrificing quality for quantity.

To avoid wearing yourself out, you need to set aside time in each day when work is forbidden; it’s often easiest to do this at the beginning and end of the day. I follow a morning routine of reading, journaling, mediation and/or exercise, and I prioritize spending dinner time with my family, away from any kind of technology—at least most of the time. I’ve also gotten much better at shutting down my computer well before bedtime and staying away from it on the weekends.

These non-negotiable time blocks are important for keeping me balanced and ensuring I have time to focus on priorities and relationships outside of work. If you allow yourself time to engage in things outside of work, you’ll find yourself more rested, focused and able to contribute much more when you are actually working.

Leverage Interval Training

Keeping yourself from overworking isn’t just about your working hours—it’s also about how you work, and what you do when. In the fitness world, there’s a widespread practice of interval training: strong bursts of rigorous exercise, followed by a brief period of rest. This scientifically proven method builds your strength and stamina without overexerting your body, and it works better than going all-out all the time.

The interval training principle works for professional tasks as well. Be intentional to separate periods of mentally strenuous work with short breaks to ensure you maintain your energy and don’t overdo it.