How to manage workaholism as a leader

No one plans for their obsession to run the company. But that’s often how it goes. We call it hustle. Grit. Founder drive. Late nights blur into early mornings, and every dopamine hit—from a Stripe notification to a Slack praise emoji—rewards the loop. At first, it feels like strength. But beneath it all is a quieter truth: workaholism isn’t just a behavior. It’s a belief system. One that says: if I stop, things will fall apart. If I pause, I’ll be exposed. If I rest, I lose.

I know this because I lived it. For the first two years of building my second company, I didn’t take a single day fully off. Not even Sundays. Not even Hari Raya. My laptop came with me everywhere: weddings, holidays, funerals. I called it “commitment.” My co-founder called it “unsustainable.” I didn’t listen—until I broke something I couldn’t fix.

Founders don’t just overwork because they have to. We overwork because somewhere deep down, we think we are the work.

That product launch? A test of your self-worth. That investor meeting? Validation that you matter. That missed opportunity? Proof you were never good enough to begin with.

This isn't about calendar load or inbox count. It’s about the emotional weight you’ve given to output. Because in startup land, praise often sounds like pathology: “She’s relentless.” “He never stops.” “They’re always on.” I remember replying to a junior designer at 11:16pm. Her thank-you message—earnest, appreciative—landed like a slap. That night, I realized I wasn’t just burning myself out. I was setting the standard for everyone else to match.

Here’s what’s tricky: workaholism often works in the beginning.

You get more done than most. You can troubleshoot faster than your team. You know every customer personally. And when a crisis hits, you’re already at your desk.

But that intensity has a shelf life. Over time, your team begins to disengage. Not because they’re lazy, but because they don’t trust they’ll ever be “enough.” Delegation gets murky. Burnout creeps in. Your best people quietly leave—not for better pay, but for boundaries. Workaholism is scalable only in one direction: downward. It trains everyone to overextend, people-please, and stay silent. It creates a culture of performance over resilience. If you’re honest, ask yourself: Are you running the company—or are you bracing it?

It wasn’t some dramatic breakdown. I didn’t faint at my desk or cry in a bathroom stall. The unraveling was subtle. My sleep got worse. I grew short with the team. I stopped doing one-on-ones because “there wasn’t time.” Strategy started shrinking into task lists. And then I missed something important. A developer flagged a serious privacy bug. I half-read the message, assumed it was a permissions hiccup, and said “fix it after launch.” He fixed it before—thank God. But it could have cost us our biggest enterprise customer. That shook me. Because I’d built a team I didn’t trust to lead. Not because they couldn’t. But because I never gave them space to.

I didn’t cure my workaholism. I gave it a container. Here’s what that looked like:

1. Redefine your ‘on’ hours—ruthlessly.
I set hard rules: 8am to 7pm. No Slack after. No email refresh in bed. My team knew I meant it when I didn’t respond—even when it killed me not to.

2. Build rest into performance metrics.
We stopped praising “always available.” Instead, we praised team members who set boundaries and kept the roadmap steady. I modeled it publicly. Not by posting about wellness—but by showing up less and letting others lead more.

3. Stop solving everything.
If a task didn’t need my brain, I delegated and didn’t check in. I created default rules for decisions. I taught the team to triage without me.

4. Track the right scoreboard.
Instead of how many tasks I completed, I tracked how many decisions the team made without me. That became my new KPI.

Over time, my obsession didn’t disappear—it transformed. From control to clarity. From compulsion to rhythm. It wasn’t about time. It wasn’t about efficiency. It wasn’t even about burnout. It was about trust. Trust that the team could deliver. Trust that the business could run without me micromanaging. And most of all, trust that I was more than the company I built.

That took longer to learn than any GTM strategy. Because hustle, for many of us, is a trauma response disguised as a strength. And until you name it, you can’t repurpose it. I used to think I needed to work more to earn rest. Now I know the opposite is true: I needed to rest to work well.

You don’t have to become some zen CEO who surfs before standups and journals before check-ins. You can still care deeply. Still push hard. Still stay up late for that final feature sprint. But make it a choice—not a pattern. If your workaholism feels like survival, not flow, something’s off. And the longer you ignore it, the more damage it does—not just to you, but to the team learning by watching you. You don’t scale companies by doing more. You scale them by needing to do less.

So start here:

• Audit your hours—but more importantly, audit your inputs.
• Ask your team if they feel ownership or just oversight.
• Schedule a day where you don’t touch the product. See what breaks. That’s where to focus.

There’s a version of you that still loves the grind—but no longer needs it. That version hires better. Builds stronger systems. Sleeps deeper. Listens more. And ironically? That version usually wins. Because workaholism unmanaged is fragility disguised as fire. But when you give it structure, rhythm, and clarity, it becomes something else entirely:

Conviction—with stamina. And that’s what real founders build with.

Here’s what I missed when I was in it: overwork doesn’t just exhaust your energy—it distorts your judgment.

When you run at full speed for too long, you start making reactive decisions. You confuse activity for impact. You conflate stress with urgency. And worst of all, you slowly lose the ability to distinguish between what only you can do, and what just feels safer to keep doing. I once spent three weeks personally rewriting copy for our investor deck. Not because my team couldn’t handle it—they could. But because I felt too exposed to let anyone else touch it. It wasn’t copy. It was armor.

Looking back, that choice cost us more than time. It sent a message to my team that trust was conditional. That their work would always need editing. That I was the filter for quality—no matter how many “growth mindset” slogans I posted. And in early-stage companies, culture isn’t what you declare. It’s what you permit. And what you repeat.

Every founder hits this fork at some point: either build a business that depends on your burnout, or design one that outlives your intensity.

The shift starts with systems thinking. Ask yourself:

• What decisions are getting bottlenecked at me—and why?
• Where are we relying on vigilance instead of clarity?
• Which roles need redefinition—not redoing?

We implemented a simple framework called “decision zones.” Every task was mapped as owner-led, co-signed, or founder-reserved. It forced me to delegate by default and only step in when necessary. Suddenly, team members didn’t just complete tasks—they owned outcomes. That single shift bought me back my weekends. Not because I worked less, but because I built less fragility into the system.

The hardest part about managing workaholism as a founder is that the world often rewards it—until it doesn’t. Investors love “gritty.” Teams admire “hands-on.” Press glorifies the 4am founder myth. But obsession isn’t what keeps a company alive. Structure is. Trust is. Repeatability is. And the real test isn’t how hard you work when things are on fire. It’s how little breaks when you step away.

Because if your startup can’t run without your burnout, then what you’ve built isn’t freedom. It’s a trap. Choose differently. You’re allowed.