How to Protect Your Energy as a CEO
Most founders treat time as their constraint and manage accordingly — tighter calendars, better tools, more efficient meetings. Then they find that a week with fewer hours in it left them just as depleted, which is confusing until you notice that the depleting things and the time-consuming things are not the same list. Four specific drains account for most of a CEO’s energy, two of them are not counted as work by anyone including you, and each has a design response. This page is about the steady state rather than about recovering from a crisis.
What’s inside
Energy is the constraint, not time
The four drains
The two nobody counts
Designing the week around them
What to stop doing
The honest limits of this
Where Blomma fits
Energy is the constraint, not time
The evidence is straightforward: you have had fifty-hour weeks that left you fine and forty-hour weeks that flattened you. If hours were the variable, that would not happen.
What differs is composition. A week of deep work on one problem, with a few consequential decisions, is sustainable almost indefinitely. A week of thirty short meetings across eight unrelated domains, six ambiguous decisions, and two difficult conversations is not, even if the hours are fewer.
So the useful unit is not hours available but capacity for the specific kinds of work that cost you most. And once you look at it that way, the interventions change: the goal is not a lighter calendar but a differently composed one.
One consequence worth naming: efficiency work can make this worse. Compressing your week so that every hour contains a decision or a difficult conversation produces a calendar that looks admirable and is unsurvivable.
The four drains
Decision volume.The number of consequential, ambiguous decisions per week. Deciding is specifically depleting in a way that executing is not, and ambiguity is the multiplier — a clear decision costs little, a genuinely unclear one with real stakes costs a great deal. This is usually the largest drain and the least measured.
Emotional labour.Difficult conversations, holding other people’s anxiety, managing your own visible state. Every hard conversation costs, and so does every hour of being steady for other people while not feeling steady. Almost nobody counts this as work, including the person doing it.
Context switching.Eight unrelated domains in a day. Each switch has a real cost, and a CEO’s calendar is structurally the most fragmented in the company. Fragmentation alone can account for the difference between a good and a bad week at identical hours.
Performance.Being observed. At scale you are read closely by people with little other information about you, so you are managing your demeanour almost continuously. This is invisible, constant, and genuinely tiring.
Rank these for yourself over a fortnight. Most founders find one dominates, and knowing which changes what to fix.
The two nobody counts
Emotional labour and performance deserve a moment, because they are the two that go unaccounted for and together they often exceed the other two.
Emotional labour is not soft. Holding a difficult conversation, absorbing someone’s distress about a decision, staying calm while being told something bad, carrying the knowledge that a person’s job is at risk before they know — each has a real cost, and a week with four of those in it is a heavy week regardless of hours.
Performance is the subtler one. When you become senior enough that people read you closely, you are never entirely off duty inside the building. Every corridor interaction is a signal someone will interpret. That is not paranoia; it is an accurate description of your position, and it means the ambient cost of being present in your own company is higher than it was three years ago.
Two practical consequences. Count them: when you plan a week, treat two difficult conversations as a significant load rather than as two half-hour slots. And build genuinely unobserved time — not holiday, just hours where you are not being read. For many founders this is the single largest available recovery and they have never scheduled it.
Designing the week around them
Four design moves, matched to the drains.
For decision volume: reduce the number, not the hours.Write down decision rights so a class of decisions stops arriving. Set standing defaults for recurring choices. Batch decisions into a block rather than taking them as they arrive. This is the highest-return intervention available and it is structural rather than personal.
For emotional labour: space it and follow it with recovery.Do not stack three difficult conversations in a day. Put something restorative or mechanical after each one rather than another meeting. And notice that the conversation you are dreading costs you more in the fortnight of anticipation than in the event — which is an argument for doing it sooner, not for avoiding it.
For context switching: block by domain.Group the work that belongs together. Two half-days a week on one thing is worth more than five fragmented mornings, both in output and in what it costs you.
For performance: schedule unobserved time.Work from somewhere else, keep a block with no one in it, and take a proper break where you are genuinely unreachable rather than monitoring. A working holiday provides no recovery from this particular drain.
And protect the physical basics, which multiply everything. The same week lands entirely differently on six hours of sleep than eight, and this is the factor founders discount hardest because it seems too simple.
What to stop doing
Four things that cost more than they return.
Meetings where you are not the decision-maker.Your presence converts a working session into a review, so you are paying an attention cost to make the meeting worse.
Being available continuously.Constant availability means constant partial context-switching, which is the most expensive way to be helpful. Scheduled access — office hours, a standing slot — gives people more of you at a fraction of the cost.
Reviewing work in your strongest area.The highest-value thing to stop and the hardest, because it is the work you enjoy. It is also usually your largest calendar block.
Deferring the conversation you are dreading.This is the one founders do not recognise as an energy issue. An unresolved difficult conversation runs in the background for weeks and costs more than having it. Doing it this week is an energy decision as much as a management one.
The honest limits of this
Worth being straight, because the genre this page belongs to tends to overpromise.
Some periods are genuinely unsustainable and no design fixes them. A fundraise, a crisis, a difficult transition — those are heavy and the honest response is to run hot deliberately, name the end date, and plan recovery afterwards rather than pretending the load is optimisable.
What does not work is treating a permanent state as a sprint. If every quarter has been the exceptional one for two years, the load is structural and needs a structural fix — usually a hire, a scope change, or a decision you have been avoiding.
And if you are already past depletion into something that does not lift with rest — persistent cynicism, dread, physical symptoms — this page is the wrong tool. That is burnout, and it needs recovery and possibly medical attention rather than a better-designed week.
Where Blomma fits
Two of the four drains are directly addressed by having somewhere outside your company to think.
The emotional labour drain is largely about carrying things alone — the conversation you have not had, the decision about a person, the thing you cannot say to your team or your board. Blomma is an always-on AI career coach with no stake in your company: somewhere to put that at the point you are carrying it rather than weeks later. That is not incidental to the drain; it is most of it.
Use it also for the decision-volume drain — working out which classes of decision could stop reaching you and drafting the rights that make it real. Use it to prepare the conversation you are dreading, which is usually cheaper to have than to postpone. And use it to work out which of the four drains actually dominates your fortnight, because the design response is different for each and most founders guess wrong. Where the situation warrants a human coach, bring one in..
Your constraint is not hours. It is the volume of ambiguous decisions, the emotional labour nobody counts, the fragmentation of your calendar, and the cost of being observed — and each of those responds to design rather than to discipline.