Work In Sprints
Managing your energy, not your hours
Every entrepreneur I know runs at a thousand miles an hour. I know I do.
And I want to say something upfront that many writing on this subject will not.
I love it.
The fast chapters are the best chapters.
Fundraises, launches, the first ninety days of something new, the weeks where you are so far inside a problem that you forget to eat. That is where the good stuff happens. I have never regretted one of those chapters and I am not going to tell anyone to want them less.
The standard advice here is to slow down.
I think that is badly aimed. The question was never how to run less fast. It is how to keep doing this for thirty years, across multiple companies, and still be sharp, still be interested, still be someone worth being at the end of it.
That is a solvable problem.
It just does not get solved by easing off.
It gets solved by working in sprints.
Nobody Sprints A Marathon, And Nobody Should
Look at how performance actually works anywhere it has been studied properly.
No serious athlete trains at a constant intensity. They periodise.
Blocks of brutal load followed by deliberate deload weeks, and the deload is not a concession, it is the part where the adaptation happens. Muscle is not built under the bar. It is built in the recovery after it. Skip the recovery and you do not get a stronger athlete working harder, you get a plateau, then an injury.
The same structure shows up everywhere. Interval training beats steady state.
Sprinters and marathoners have completely different physiologies and neither can do the other’s job.
As we’ve built software companies, particularly venture backed, we quietly started holding ourselves to its standard. Systems that run continuously, scale on demand, never tire. AI does not sleep, does not need a deload week, does not have a bad Tuesday.
And somewhere in the last decade, particularly post COVID, without ever deciding to, founders started trying to operate the same way.
That is a category error, and frankly doesn’t work. It is the most common one I see in people who are otherwise extremely smart.
Here is the thing.
The mistake is almost never the sprinting.
The mistake is trying to sprint all of the time.
Watch anyone actually sprint. They go flat out, and then they stop.
Not because they lack commitment, but because that is how sprinting works. The stop is not a failure of the sprint. It is part of it. It is the thing that makes the next one possible at the same speed.
And this is the part worth sitting with.
You do not get to choose whether you slow down. You only get to choose whether you pick the moment.
Refuse the break and you do not get a longer sprint.
You get a slower one, arriving on a timetable you did not set, in the middle of something that mattered.
The break is not the price of going fast. It is the mechanism.
Name The Sprint Before You Start It
A sprint has three properties.
It is intense, it is finite, and you know both of those things going in.
Most founders get the first one and neither of the others. The intensity is permanent, undated, and unexamined. It is not a sprint, it is just the ambient condition, and ambient intensity is what actually grinds people down to burnout or worse.
So name it. Out loud, in writing, to the people around you.
What is this sprint for? The raise closing. The launch shipping. The pilot converting. One outcome, not five.
When does it end? An actual date. Not “when things calm down,” which is a date that has never arrived for anyone.
What does it cost, and am I paying that knowingly? Six weeks of bad sleep and no weekends is a legitimate trade for a fundraise. It is a terrible trade for a Tuesday in a quiet quarter.
What happens the week after? Decide this before you start, because the version of you at the end of a sprint has no capacity left to plan a recovery.
That last one is the whole discipline.
A sprint without a defined stop is not a sprint, and everything that goes wrong with founder intensity goes wrong at exactly that point.
Take The Deload, Or It Gets Taken For You
The most instructive thing that has happened in my career was not building ContentCal. It was what came after we sold.
You spend years with everything aimed at one outcome. Every decision, every weekend, every conversation, pointed the same direction. Then it happens.
And what I found on the other side genuinely surprised me. I was mentally and physically exhausted, I had been running flat out for years. But, what I found post sale, which was really uncomfortable at the time, was space.
More of it than I had had in half a decade, and no idea what to do with it.
It turned into a reset - intellectually, spiritually and physically.
I got to think properly for the first time in years.
Spend real time with people I had been meaning to spend time with.
Travel. Read.
Work out what I actually wanted to do next rather than what happened to be in front of me. Almost everything good I am doing now traces directly back to that period.
I am grateful for it. And here is the reason I am writing this.
I did not choose it.
It was handed to me post acquisition, where I was no longer running a company, but I was doing a very specific job, which is still a fairly unreliable way to schedule a deload period.
That was a 8-year sprint with a recovery phase bolted on by accident at the end.
And it was not easy to go from a million miles an hour to a much slower place.
However, it worked out because of an outcome that was not guaranteed and could easily have gone the other way. In which case I would have had the same 8 years and no reset at all.
The interesting question is what you do if you want that clarity but you want to own it.
Stop Measuring Effort, Start Measuring Rhythm
Here is what I would tell myself in 2016.
You can run at a thousand miles an hour, on very little sleep, in a state that would look alarming on any wellness dashboard, and be genuinely thriving. It happens all the time. It happened to me for years.
And you can be perfectly rested, with excellent boundaries and a hard stop at seven, and be slowly going flat.
Hours are not the input that determines the outcome. The rhythm is.
Two questions get you most of the way there.
Am I in a sprint, or have I just forgotten how to stop? These feel identical from the inside and they are completely different things. A sprint has an object and an end date. Habitual intensity has neither, and it is the more common of the two by a wide margin.
When did I last actually recover? Not “when did I last have a weekend.” When did you last come back to something with a genuinely fresh head. If you cannot remember, you have been jogging at sprint intensity for a long time and the returns went negative somewhere you did not notice.
Learn What Actually Recharges You
Recovery is not one thing, and this is where most people quietly fail.
Sitting on the sofa scrolling is not recovery. It is anaesthetic.
They feel similar in the moment and they do completely different things to you, because one restores capacity and the other just mutes the alarm telling you the capacity is gone.
Real recovery is specific, and it is personal. Mine:
Walks. Not for the steps. For the thinking that only happens when nothing else is competing for attention.
Exercise. The single most reliable input I have. Every other part of my week is better when it is happening.
Socialising. Real conversations with people who knew me before any of this.
Travel. Something about an unfamiliar place resets the frame. Problems look different from a different country.
Breathwork. The fastest tool I own for getting out of an intense period. Minutes, not hours.
Deep thinking time. Unstructured, no output required, nothing to show for it.
Writing. Partly why this exists. I do not know what I think until I have written it down.
Yours may look nothing like that. Someone else’s routine is data about them, not a template for you.
Go back over the last two years, find the moments you felt genuinely restored rather than just less tired, and work backwards to what you were doing.
Then treat those things as infrastructure, not as treats you have earned.
Run Your Life With Redundancy
There is one more thing that separates people who sprint for thirty years from people who sprint for five.
You would never run production on a single instance. Not because you expect it to fail, but because the cost of it failing is catastrophic and the cost of a second instance is small.
Your life is the same architecture, and most founders run it single-instance.
I used to think of everything outside the company as the thing I would attend to once the company was sorted. A cost against the ambition, deferred.
It is the opposite. The people I know who have run hard for twenty years and are still good company are not the ones who worked less.
They are the ones who had a relationship that worked, friends who predated the business, a body that functioned, something they were good at that nobody paid them for. None of that slowed them down.
It is the reason they could take the next swing. And the reason they were still standing when most of their cohort had quietly gone elsewhere.
Redundancy is not a brake. It is what lets you keep your foot down.
Borrow Dyson’s Five Balls, But Read Them Properly
Brian Dyson, who ran Coca-Cola Enterprises, gave a commencement speech at Georgia Tech in 1991. It gets quoted endlessly and misattributed to some anonymous Google executive on LinkedIn about once a week. It was not Google. It was Dyson.
You are juggling five balls. Work, family, health, friends, spirit.
Work is rubber. Drop it and it bounces. The deal collapses, the round takes an extra six months, the launch slips, the company does not make it. It hurts, and it is recoverable. That category is far bigger than most founders let themselves believe.
The other four are glass. Drop one and it nicks, cracks, or shatters. You can put it back together and it will hold, sort of, but you will always see the line.
It is usually read as a scolding. Be careful, stop neglecting the important things.
I read it as something more useful. The rubber ball bounces precisely because the other four are there to catch you. Work being recoverable is not an inherent property of work. It is a property of having a life underneath it. If the company is the only thing in your hands, nothing about it bounces, and every setback becomes existential rather than merely annoying.
Which makes the glass balls the opposite of a constraint on ambition. They are what makes big swings survivable, and therefore what makes big swings possible.
Build The Circuit Breakers Before You Need Them
I have been back in the driving seat now for 2 years and predictably, back at a thousand miles an hour. This time I am trying to install the structure deliberately rather than waiting for something to install it for me.
A hard stop most evenings. Not every evening, I am not going to pretend. A default that has to be actively overridden rather than passively ignored.
Non-negotiable movement. Twenty minutes minimum, on the worst days as well as the best. The floor matters more than the ceiling.
Phone away during evenings (Bloody tough in reality). Unglamorous, but the highest-leverage change on this list.
Something in the diary that is not work. Booked ahead, protected like a board meeting, because otherwise it is the first thing to go.
A deload week after every real sprint. Scheduled at the start of the sprint, not negotiated at the end when you have no capacity to argue for it.
A monthly check-in. Which chapter am I in, is this intensity a choice or a habit, and what has quietly fallen off the list.
None of it is impressive.
It is maintenance, and maintenance is boring by design. The impressive stuff only compounds when the maintenance is handled.
Ask The Only Question That Matters
Not “am I working too hard.” That question has never produced a useful answer for anyone, and it is the wrong shape.
Ask this instead, quarterly, written down.
Am I in a sprint, or have I just forgotten how to stop?
What is standing in my life right now that is not the work?
If the honest list is shorter than you would like, that is not a verdict on you.
It is a to-do list, and a genuinely enjoyable one to work through.
Go Fast. Then Actually Stop.
None of this is about doing less. I want to be clear on that, because the wellness version of this conversation always lands on “slow down,” and that is bad advice for anyone reading this.
Go fast. Take the swing. Do the chapter where you forget to eat.
That is where the good stuff is, and a life without chapters like that in it does not sound like a life I want.
Just make it a sprint rather than a permanent setting.
Give it an end date.
Build the recovery in before you need it, and build the life underneath it so you can do it again, and again, and still be sharp in twenty years.
The speed was never the risk.
Not knowing how to stop and re-charge is.