[Founder’s Real Talk #5] How to prioritize and avoid burnout
The best way to describe a founder’s work is, like how my mom describes her housework — there’s always an endless amount of work to do. (Full disclosure: she’s had an amazing career and done an incredible job balancing work and family.) If you want to find work to do, there’s always more.
A tendency for founders is to spend a lot of time on the “startup” stuff — researching and comparing the optimal tech or ops stack such as credit card, project management system, organizing internal docs and files, aligning employees' software accesses, documenting procedures and communication channels. Everything here listed is important, and they actually make you feel so busy and accomplished. You can easily fill your day with all these chores, but left no quality time for the most essential things — your clients, your products, and your strategy.
One thing that I found super helpful is to avoid “overtime”. Admittedly, the standard for “overtime” is definitely different for a founder vs for an employee, let alone different across different regions and markets. But what I mean here is to set up boundaries that you feel are the most appropriate for your own balance of life.
This is analogous to the tutoring sessions when we were students. A common practice is to sign up for so many overtime tutoring sessions that you lost your focus and attention during classroom times. For my middle school and high school days in Shanghai, I actually never attended those overtime tutoring sessions and used all my efforts and attention span on the classroom times. I found myself more energetic listening to my teachers and more productive doing homework. Certainly, I wasn’t top of my class, but I was able to balance pretty good school work with a mindset that’s always fresh and curious, and time to do all my extra-curricular activities.
Same thing with my entrepreneurial lifestyle now. Of course, you are expected to put in more than 40 hours a week — most times 50–60 hours, sometimes 80 but definitely not the norm. But you should definitely set up boundaries to create a sense of urgency for yourself, so that instead of dragging your working hours on and on, your mind goes like you always have a tight schedule and deadline to beat, and then you’ll realize what’s the most important thing to prioritize.
The boundaries will help you avoid burnout, because you’ll have a clear mindset and a fresh eye to reflect on what you are doing. You’ll have time to exercise, to do deep thinking, to do the things you enjoy — for me, stand-up paddleboarding, piano+singing, chess, and wine-tasting, to exercise and meditate, and most importantly to spend time with your family — my wife is also a founder, voila our lifestyle.
It’s always easier said than done, and I’m never doing this perfectly. You’ll have moments of anxiety, sleepless nights, and vacations that you end up spending most of the time in front of your computer or on the phone. But you shouldn’t stop looking at the north star and adjust your trajectory to it.
