How to Stop Letting Your Week Run You

Earlier in my career, I was a VP in corporate, raising a family, and by most measures, doing everything right.

I was meeting deadlines, showing up prepared and putting in the hours.

And I was exhausted in a way that went bone-deep. I was waking up at 2 am with my mind already running. By Sunday evening I was anxious about Monday before the week had even started.

The problem wasn't my work ethic because I had plenty of that. The problem was that I had no protected time to think. I was always in the doing: meetings, requests, follow-ups, and putting out fires.  As a result, I wasn't being strategic about what I actually wanted my career and my life to look like.

My week was running me. And I didn't see it until I burned out.

That experience is not unique. It's a pattern I see in many senior leaders I work with today.

What Gets in the Way

Most leaders I work with aren't short on capability or commitment. What they're short on is space to think.

The week fills up fast. You move from one thing to the next, and by Friday, you've been busy every single day without being sure you've moved the needle on anything that actually matters. That cycle is easy to normalize because everyone around you is in it, too. And the higher you go, the more invisible that cost becomes because you're still delivering. You're just not advancing.

As Greg McKeown writes in Essentialism: "If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will." That line stopped me when I first read it because it was exactly what was happening. My calendar was full but it was just full of other people's priorities.

What the Research Says

Professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria at Harvard Business School tracked 27 CEOs around-the-clock for 13 weeks. The most effective CEOs have the same hours and same pressures. Research showed that the most effective leaders were intentional about how they spent their time. 

A Fast Company piece covering the study noted that the most successful CEOs were also disciplined about their time away from work: time to rest, reflect, and think strategically. 

The Simple Practice

The leaders who get ahead aren't the ones who work the hardest. They're the ones who consistently step back - before the week gets away from them - to ask whether they're working on the right things, moving toward the right goals, and showing up the way they intend to.

I call that practice Weekly Strategy Time - a consistent 60-minute block once a week - to think before you execute and to look at the bigger picture. During this appointment with yourself, you make deliberate choices about your week, your career, and your life before someone else makes them for you.

Warren Buffett said it directly: "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything." That kind of clarity doesn't happen by accident. It happens by design. Weekly Strategy Time is how you build it: one hour, every week, on purpose.

I spent years being the leader who was always available, always delivering, always one step behind where I wanted to be. Weekly Strategy Time is what changed that because it gave me back protected time to think. I wake up on Monday now knowing exactly what the week is for. The anxiety is gone. I lead from the front instead of catching up from behind.

One hour a week is the investment. Are you willing to protect it?