“Load Management” is a term made popular in the NBA and that is now embraced by nearly every professional sports league. Load management suggests that star athletes should sit out select games to reduce long-term fatigue and the percentage chance of a star sustaining a serious injury that reduces their ability to best produce for their team over a long season.
Load Management dovetails with another concept often discussed in startups -- that founders should treat the multi-year process of building a company as a "walk, run, sprint" and that world-class founders need to learn how to downshift and upshift to bring their best to the different challenges you face while running a startup.
Why Founders Should Load Manage:
Hitting burnout as a founder is both personally destructive and destructive to your startup.
I can speak from experience that burnout operates like a frog in boiling water. As a founder, six years into my startup, I didn’t know I was boiling until I crashed. Once it happened, my output dropped and had negative repercussions across our team.
“Down Shifting” is a term I picked up from the work of Steve Schlafman which highlights a skill that founders need in their toolbox, which is the ability to intentionally slow down at critical to be able to sustain the energy needed to operate at peak capacity over the many years of building a startup.
Down Shifting is how you load manage as a founder and can be done in small ways (for 30 minutes during an intense work day or in the form of a more substantial day or multi-day break.
How to Downshift as a Founder
You can’t sprint forever. The first step to being able to downshift is accepting that you should — for your health and that of your startup. Sprinting nonstop may feel good at the moment but is a liability in the long term.
Find ways to take micro-downshifts that work for you. Learning how to downshift for short periods of time, amidst an intense day is like a runner learning how to adjust their cadence, during a marathon. This ability to control your intensity and throttle up and down will help you even out your output and operate with more creativity and effectiveness as a leader. Here are some practices that CEOs and founders I work with have implemented.
Block 15 minutes in the middle of your day or early afternoon, to slow down, go for a walk, and think about what your top goal should be for the remainder of the day.
End meetings 10 minutes before the hours. Use the time between meetings to slow down, reflect, and take notes or actions on anything covered in your last call.
Develop a short and high-impact workout routine that can be done regularly even during intense days/weeks. For example, a 30-minute body workout, or 30-minute run that can easily be done at home, at a hotel, or near your office.
Complete a 10-minute journaling exercise after lunch.
Or, even more micro, commit to 1-minute of slow breathing to down-regulate, anchored to something you do regularly, like drinking water or going to the bathroom.
Choose to focus on a single Top Goal as you scale. As Matt Mochary says, in the article I link to, “in startups fires never cease to burn.” The framework of setting and prioritizing a singular top goal is a strategic way to downshift, by forcing you as a founder, to not overextend as your company hyper-scales. This is perhaps the single most effective tool for avoiding burnout and enforcing best practices, that I see used by scale-up CEOs and founders.
When you take time, take time. Here’s a scenario I hear about frequently. A founder or CEO client is running on fumes. They have a much-needed vacation approaching and they know that the most important thing for them to do in service of their startup is to take this time off to recharge. The vacation comes and they spend the entire trip trying to relax, but still working. They don’t make significant progress on work and get minimal energy back from their first vacation in 18+ months. Does this sound familiar? The solution is to recognize this trap and be fully off, even if that’s uncomfortable when you say you will. Some ways to enforce this include:
Communicating that you will be off when you’re off, makes it easier to commit to this decision.
Recognizing that there may be ONE essential todo you need to complete while on a break. In this case, scheduling blocks of time to use to complete this ONE item and committing to completing that task in the time alotted. This approach is critical if you’re a founder for whom being fully unplugged would add stress and distract you, in which case you are intentionally doing one high-priority task, while otherwise being fully off.
Macro downshifts — pick the right amount of time to take off. If you think you’re reaching a breaking point as a founder, it’s important to look at this fact objectively and pick the right amount of time to take off to meaningfully restore your energy, focus, and creativity. The easiest analogy is to think of your burnout and fatigue like a physical injury. We all know that different physical injuries (from a sprained ankle requires to a torn ACL) require different lengths of time and rehab programs to heal. Similarly, as a founder or CEO who hits a breaking point, you need to come up with the right plan to get back to a healthy place. Ideally, in these circumstances, you should consult a coach or expert to help you assess where you are at and what you need, because similar to what happens to an athlete who returns too soon from an injury, the same risk applies if you apply the wrong solution to mental exhaustion with the same risks to your team and company.
Results:
The benefit of downshifting is not just injury reduction, but also finding new and emergent solutions to problems you are stuck on, which can’t be solved effectively when you are depleted. Here are some of the unexpected positive results I heard from clients of mine who took time off this holiday season:
Interpersonal issues resolved themselves. One co-founder client of mine, returned from a week of vacation to find that the co-founder issue they and their co-founder had been banging their head against had resolved itself. Time away took the urgency and stress out of the dynamic and allowed the work we had done on the issue to integrate into their relationship. They came back from the holiday with less frustration and renewed focus.
Clarity. A CEO client of mine came back from the holidays, with clarity on a long-standing sales issue they had been circling on. The time off allowed the right solution to become clear in their mind and their energy shifted to excitement when they returned to the office with a clear path forward.
Avoiding a crash. As mentioned, when I was a young founder, I did a terrible job of load management. I remember, the day after we raised our Series A, I vented to my co-founder about 10 different issues we now needed to address. This stemmed from insecurity and the inability to sit in the uncertainty that is a constant at any high-growth startup. By not allowing myself to enjoy the good times, I was less equipped to level up and handle the extended high-intensity periods (fundraising, pivoting our B2B product, etc.) that were waiting for us on the road ahead. It’s critical to nurture different of identities as a founder (relationships, health, and more) when you have the space to do so and no one will tell you to do this.
Is downshifting and load management something you do as a founder/leader? How do you approach this process?
