Method & recovery
What I'd look at first if a founder told me he was completely depleted
Five things, in this order. None of them is "how many hours are you working", and the reason is that the answer to that question has almost never been the finding.
Someone sits down and says they are running on empty. Here is what I actually check, in order, in roughly the first two sessions.
The order matters. Each one changes how I read the next.
One — sleep, and whether it repairs
Always first, and not as a wellness gesture.
Not how many hours. Whether it converts. Eight hours that produce the effect of four is a completely different finding from six hours that work.
I want to know: do you wake unrefreshed after a full night? Do you wake between two and four with your mind running? Do you fall asleep instantly on the sofa and lie awake in bed — a specific pattern that suggests activation rather than sleep debt?
And I want the medical possibilities excluded before anything else. Thyroid, ferritin and full iron studies, B12, vitamin D, and especially sleep apnoea, which is badly under-diagnosed in men over thirty-five and produces this entire picture on its own. If someone has untreated apnoea, everything I do afterwards is wasted effort until it is treated. This is not a disclaimer; it is the single most consequential fork in the first month.
Two — the open decisions
I ask for a list of everything currently unresolved that they are carrying.
Not their task list. The things with no clean answer that keep resurfacing: the senior hire, the co-founder conversation, the client relationship they know is wrong, the product line that should be killed.
Most people name three to five within ninety seconds, which tells you they were never far from the surface.
This is usually where the fastest available improvement lives. Every open loop consumes background capacity continuously, and closing one — genuinely deciding, or deliberately deferring with a named date — frequently produces a disproportionate improvement in sleep within a week. It costs no time. It costs willingness.
Three — where the vigilance is
Not hours worked. Hours during which some part of them is monitoring.
Where in your week are you genuinely unreachable — and does anyone else know it? If the answer is nowhere, then the readiness is running continuously and everything else lands on top of an already loaded system.
This is the most underestimated cost in leadership work, because it never appears as an event. It has no calendar entry and no visible output. It just runs.
Four — what returns anything
I ask for one thing they do purely because it gives energy back.
Most people in this state cannot answer. They have a long list of what costs and nothing on the other side. Over several years, everything that returned got squeezed out because it looked optional next to what was urgent — training first, then whatever had no purpose attached, then time with people who ask nothing of them.
That asymmetry is very often the whole diagnosis. A life composed entirely of expenditure cannot be fixed by sleeping more, and this is the point at which most people realise they have been trying to subtract their way to a surplus.
Five — four weeks of calendar
Past, not planned.
I read for: what proportion was initiated by them versus accepted from someone else; whether the white space survived contact with the actual day; where the hardest items sit relative to each other; what disappeared over the last year and roughly when; and whether anything personal is in there at all.
People describe their own week inaccurately in consistent directions. The calendar does not.
What I do with the five answers
If sleep does not repair and there is a plausible medical cause — that gets resolved first, before anything else. Nothing above it is reliable until then.
If sleep is broken but medically clear, and there are three or more open decisions — that is a rumination-driven picture, and closing loops plus a genuine end to the day usually moves it faster than anything else available.
If vigilance is continuous, the priority is real unavailability with everyone informed, because the relief comes from the knowing rather than the hours.
If nothing returns anything, no amount of subtraction will be sufficient. Something has to go back in before anything else works.
If the calendar shows seventy per cent inbound, this is a structural problem presenting as an energy problem, and stabilisation alone will not hold.
Most people show three of these at once. The sequencing question is which single one, addressed first, unlocks the others — and that is genuinely individual.
What I do not do in the first month
Restructure anything. Set goals. Build a plan.
A depleted person handed a good plan produces a second failure to add to the first. Plans are stage four, and stage four does not work until the first three have happened.
None of this is exotic. What makes it work is the order, and the discipline of not skipping to the part that feels like progress.
Start here: burnout coaching for founders and executives · All articles
