Founder burnout.

Why the owner burns out before everyone else

An employee's working day ends. The owner's never ends: responsibility for revenue, salaries and obligations stays with them in the evening and at weekends.

Add to this the speed of change. Working conditions change faster than the usual order has time to settle: platform rules, supplier prices, customer behaviour. To stay afloat you have to keep readjusting, and readjustment takes energy.

This is where the trap lies. Fear and tension drain energy fastest of all, and in that state attention narrows: a person reacts to the nearest threat and stops seeing the whole picture. Decisions get worse precisely when the best ones are needed.

Hence a simple conclusion: a calm state of mind is not a luxury and not about wellbeing. It is a working tool on which the quality of decisions directly depends.

How to tell tiredness from burnout

Tiredness passes after rest. Burnout doesn't: after a holiday the same feeling of heaviness returns, only with added guilt for the time spent.

Signs worth paying attention to: irritation instead of interest in the business, putting off decisions that used to take a minute, the feeling that everything rests on you alone, and constant news reading instead of work.

Add to that the physical signals: disrupted sleep, trouble concentrating, the urge to close the laptop and not open it again. These are usually noticed last, although they arrive first.

An important clarification: this is not a diagnosis and not a reason to diagnose yourself. If the state lasts for months, a conversation with a specialist is as much a working tool as a consultation with a lawyer or an accountant.

What to do right now

Emergency measures are needed when decisions have to be made today and there is no energy. They don't cure, but they restore the ability to think.

• Limit the flow of news. Twice a day for fifteen minutes instead of a constant feed. You won't miss any information, and the background noise will drop noticeably.
• Separate what you can influence from what you can't. The first goes on the to-do list, the second goes out of your head. Most of the anxiety lives in the second.
• Give your body some exertion. Physical activity is the fastest way to lower tension, and it works better than any self-persuasion.
• Restore your sleep. Decisions made on five hours of sleep cost more than any unfinished task.
• Find one person with whom you can discuss business honestly: a partner, a fellow entrepreneur, a consultant. From inside your own head the picture is always distorted.

And one rule about the planning horizon: in a period of high uncertainty, planning a year ahead is pointless, and a week ahead is not enough. The working horizon is a month to a quarter, with regular review. How to arrange such a readjustment without losses is covered in the article on marketing in unstable times.

How to check information rather than react to it

Anxiety feeds not on events but on how they are presented. The same fact can be presented so that it looks like a catastrophe, or so that it looks like a routine matter. So the first defence is the habit of checking rather than reacting.

The check takes a minute and consists of four questions. Who said this and what do they gain if I believe it. Is there a primary source, or is this a retelling of a retelling. Is this a fact or an opinion. Does this affect my decisions in the coming month.

The last question cuts off most of the flow. A huge number of news items require no action from you - so they require no attention either.

Separately, watch out for wording designed to trigger emotion: words like “collapse”, “shock”, “catastrophe” usually mean there is little substance in the message, and the tone is making up for it.

The team: what to do about employees' mood

An owner in balance is half the job. The other half is the people who see their state every day and read it faster than any announcements.

Start with an honest conversation. Uncertainty is harder to bear than bad news: when a person doesn't know what will happen, they imagine the worst. Regular meetings where you say directly how things stand and what will have to be done relieve more tension than any bonuses.

Next, find out what specifically people fear. The set is usually clear: redundancies, no salary growth, inability to concentrate, the disappearance of familiar work tools. Fears gathered in one list stop being background noise and turn into tasks, some of which can be solved.

Give tension an outlet within the day: short non-work calls, a shared break, something of your own that only your team has. This sounds trivial right up until the moment the team starts falling apart.

And agree that working hours are a space without the news feed. An anxious state is contagious and spreads through a team faster than any information. More on how to make this stick - in the article on managing a team.

What to take off your plate first

The most reliable way to reduce the load is to stop doing what you are not obliged to do. An owner usually accumulates a set of tasks they carry on by inertia, because they once started them themselves.

Write down everything you did over the past week and mark the tasks where your involvement adds nothing to the result. As a rule, it comes to between a third and a half of the list. What to do with it next is covered in the article on delegation.

Marketing lands on this list among the first: it requires constant attention but hardly any of yours specifically. If you hand it outside, agree in advance on the numbers and reporting dates - the selection criteria are described in the article on choosing a contractor.

What remains after the crisis

Emergency measures don't work for long. After that it makes sense to turn them into habits - then the next turbulence won't catch you off guard.

The minimum set is this: limited news consumption, regular physical activity, a fixed bedtime, a weekly half-hour review of the business numbers and one person for an honest conversation about business.

None of these points looks like a management decision. But they are exactly what determines the state in which you will make the decisions that really do look like management ones.

If it is time to take promotion off your task list, start with what delivers results without daily involvement - search engine optimisation. It is long-term work with clear reporting points: it is enough for you to look at the enquiries once a month.