You Don’t Have a Time Problem. You Have an Energy Problem.
The corporate productivity model follows you into your founding journey. Here's what it costs and how to design around your energy instead.
New here? The Inner Game is a weekly note for founders and startup leaders about the psychology and practice of building.
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This issue was inspired by my recent conversation with Sarah Kerin, founder of Efficiency, a startup automating supply chain workflows in healthcare. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, it’s worth your time.
One question before you read this
When did you last do your best thinking, and what were the conditions that made it possible?
Hold that. We’ll come back to it.
The Belief Worth Challenging
Most founders are managing the wrong resource.
Time gets calendared, blocked, protected. Hours get counted. Productivity gets measured by how full the day looks. And underneath all of it is a model inherited from corporate life: the idea that showing up consistently, for long enough, is how the work gets done.
It worked in that context. The work was predictable. The output was measurable. Effort and result tracked together in a way that made hours a reasonable proxy for progress.
Building a company is different. The decisions are harder. The thinking is non-linear. The resource that actually determines your output isn’t the time you put in, it’s the cognitive and creative state you’re in when you do it. And that resource isn’t unlimited. It depletes. It needs conditions to recover. And it doesn’t care what your calendar says.
Founders who treat energy like time, as something to fill rather than something to protect, don’t run out of hours. They run out of clarity. And they often don’t notice until they’ve been running on fumes for months.
What It Actually Looks Like
The model most founders carry into their first year was built for a different job, and Sarah Kerin is a clear example of what it costs to find that out the hard way.
Sarah spent years inside large, structured organizations, such as University of Chicago Medicine, Apple, KindBody, before founding efficientSC. Operationally rigorous, detail-oriented, and by her own description, someone who had learned to measure commitment in hours. Eight to seven. Desk time as discipline.
When she became a founder, she brought that assumption with her. And it held up, until it didn’t.
“Coming from corporate America, I was very like, okay, I’m going to get to my desk and I’m going to work from eight to seven. And then there were days where I’m like, I’m just sitting here, I’m not active right now. It’s just draining energy versus let me go take a walk, let me go do something to reset.”
What she was describing wasn’t a motivation problem or a discipline failure. She was hitting the ceiling of a model that had never been designed for the kind of work founding actually requires: non-linear thinking, judgment calls with incomplete information, creative problem-solving under sustained pressure. That work degrades sharply with mental fatigue. Logging more hours through it doesn’t produce more output; it produces worse output at higher cost.
The shift she made was a matching problem: align the type of thinking required to the state she was actually in, rather than forcing both to fit the clock.
“On the days that you’re super productive and feeling really great and very energized, keep going. Go past five, go past seven, go past nine. But on the days where you just can’t: don’t sit at your desk forcing yourself to do that.”
She also referenced Sarah Blakely, who used to drive thirty minutes to work from two minutes away, not because she needed the commute, but because she needed the uninterrupted thinking space it created. Whatever the ritual, the underlying logic is the same: protect the conditions where your best ideas happen, rather than hoping they show up on schedule.
What makes this worth taking seriously is the leverage point. As a founder, you are often the decision-maker: the bottleneck, the tie-breaker, the person whose clarity sets the tone for everything downstream. When that clarity degrades, the cost doesn’t show up on a timesheet. It shows up in the quality of your calls, your hires, your pivots, your judgment under pressure.
As Sarah put it: “It’s a marathon. You’re going to be doing this for a long time and you need to take care of yourself.”
If this resonates, forward it to a founder who’s still measuring their days by how full they look. Sometimes the reframe is the thing.
What The Research Actually Shows
Two things worth knowing:
Not all hours are created equal and the research is clear on this. Studies on cognitive performance consistently find that high-stakes thinking: strategy, judgment, complex problem-solving is acutely sensitive to mental fatigue in a way that routine tasks are not. A 2023 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Sianoja et al.)¹ found that even short recovery breaks during the workday significantly predicted afternoon cognitive performance and reduced emotional exhaustion. The practical implication: the founder who protects two hours of genuine peak focus outperforms the one who logs ten hours of diminishing returns, every time.
What you don’t do with your off-hours is costing you. Longitudinal research on psychological detachment from work (Baktash & Pütz, Journal of Happiness Studies, 2025)² found that mentally switching off from work during off-hours is a key driver of well-being across emotional, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction measures. For founders, the failure to detach doesn’t just affect how you feel, it affects how you show up in every high-stakes interaction the next day. The meeting where you needed to be sharp. The decision you made when you were already depleted. (I went deeper on the recovery side of this in Rest Isn’t a Nice to Have. It’s a Distinct Advantage.)
The Inner Game in Three Lines
You inherited a productivity model built for a different job. It doesn’t fit with building from the ground up.
The shift is from managing time to managing the conditions that produce your best thinking.
That starts with knowing what those conditions actually are for you, not in theory.
Designing Around Energy
The goal here is a more honest relationship with how you actually work, not a new system to layer on top of an already full plate.
Know your peaks. Most founders, when they look honestly at the last few weeks, can identify a recurring two-to-three hour window where they consistently think best. It’s rarely mid-afternoon. It’s rarely right after a packed meeting block. It’s usually earlier, quieter, and almost never protected. Start there: name it, then build a standing commitment to keep it clear.
Match work to state. Not everything you do requires the same thing from you. Strategic thinking, writing, important decisions, these need your peak. Team conversations and relationship work need presence, but not necessarily your sharpest hour. Email, admin, logistics, these can almost always happen later. The real question is whether you’re doing the right work at the right time, not whether you’re doing all of it.
Catch the signal before the crash. Every founder has a tell: the moment that indicates the tank is empty before they’re already running on fumes. For Sarah it was catching herself at her desk going through the motions. For others it’s shorter patience in meetings, or a reluctance to make decisions, or ideas that feel flat. Name yours. The recovery practice you need functions as an intervention, something you deploy the moment you see the signal, so tomorrow’s peak stays intact. Waiting until you’ve already crashed is too late.
Build the permission structure. The hardest part of this for most founders is the guilt, not the tactics. Walking away from the desk at 2pm feels like failure when the cultural model equates hours with commitment. The walk, the reset, the early stop, these are investments in the quality of everything that comes after, and treating them as such changes how you make the call in the moment.
The Bigger Picture
The founders who sustain performance over years aren’t the ones who work the most hours. They’re the ones who’ve built an honest relationship with the resource that actually drives their output and designed their days around protecting it.
Sarah didn’t arrive at this on day one. She carried the corporate model into her founding journey, felt the drain, and had to unlearn it in real time, while building a product, finding customers, navigating a technical stack she didn’t come from, and doing it without a team to absorb the load.
That context matters. Because the depletion doesn’t announce itself. It creeps. The founder keeps showing up, keeps answering emails, keeps sitting at the desk. But the thinking that builds companies goes quiet. And by the time they notice, they’ve spent months producing the appearance of progress while running the engine dry.
You don’t get those months back. But you can start designing differently this week.
Founder Circle
I work with a small group of founders who want three things:
Clarity on what actually moves the needle, not just busyness.
A place to think through the hard decisions: energy, focus, team dynamics, and the inner work that doesn’t make it into board decks, without having to perform confidence you don’t feel.
A peer group that gets it: other founders who are on the same path as you and get it at a level others won’t.
Our next circle meets soon. Grab your spot today.
P.S. Comment below: what’s your peak energy window and is your calendar actually protecting it? Just the honest answer. I read every response.
If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:
¹ Sianoja, M., et al. “Recovery during lunch breaks and afternoon cognitive performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 2023 — on how recovery breaks during the workday predict afternoon cognitive performance and reduce emotional exhaustion.
² Baktash, M.B., & Pütz, L. “Detach to Thrive: Psychological Detachment from Work and Employee Well-Being,” Journal of Happiness Studies, 2025 — longitudinal evidence that psychological detachment during off-hours is a key driver of well-being across emotional, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction measures.
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