Capability 20 · Human System
Manage My Energy System
A founder who planned every hour of his week wondered why he ended every Friday depleted — until he started planning only 80% of it and let the inevitable chaos fill the rest.
Founders say
“My calendar is full of everyone else's priorities. By Thursday I'm running on caffeine, and the work I actually love hasn't happened in weeks.”
Where you are today
- The week is planned to 100%, so every surprise gets paid for in evenings.
- Sleep, exercise and friends are the first things cut when pressure rises.
- The work that used to give you energy has quietly disappeared from your calendar.
Where you’re headed
- You plan 80% of the week and let the inevitable chaos fill the rest.
- Each of your seven core needs has a cadence — and most of them actually happen.
- Deep work owns your mornings, and one slot a week is reserved for the work you love.
Why this matters
Energy is not a mood — it is a system with inputs you can design. The anchor here is founder coach Dave Bailey's core-needs check-in: exercise, eating, sleep, people, solitude, learning and real time off, where each need funds a different capacity. Exercise buys willpower, sleep buys patience, solitude buys clarity, vacation buys perspective. That is why you can't substitute one for another — and why cutting them under pressure is a loan against exactly the capacities the pressure will demand.
What this means
- Understand what creates, drains and restores founder energy.
- Build a rhythm that does not depend on permanent overextension.
- Design work around sustainable performance, not just availability.
What good looks like
- Weekly planning starts with how much — capacity honestly assessed, slack deliberately left — before deciding what goes in.
- The seven core needs each have a cadence you actually track: three workouts, three meetups, three walks a week.
- The shape of the day matches your energy: planning first thing Monday, deep work before lunch, meetings after it.
Where founders get it wrong
- Planning 100% of the week. The unplanned 20% always arrives, and it collects from your evenings and weekends.
- Cutting the needs first under pressure — sleep, exercise, friends — precisely the inputs that fund willpower and patience when you need them most.
- Treating energy-giving work as an indulgence to delegate away. If you're a technical founder who loves to code, the weekly coding afternoon isn't a guilty pleasure — it's fuel.
Plan the week: how much, then what
Most founders plan what goes into the week and never ask how much should. Decide your real capacity first, then fill it — and leave deliberate slack, because the interruptions are not an exception, they are a known quantity.
"I only plan 80% of my week. The other 20% gets filled with random stuff whether I plan it or not — this way it doesn't cost me my evenings." — Series A founder
Then look at what fills it, through two lenses. Leverage: is this work only you can do? (That is Take Command of My Role's territory.) And balance: does the week contain work that gives energy back, not just work that matters? Two weeks of calendar and two highlighters — the Energy Audit — answer both. Optimising every hour for leverage until nothing in the week charges you is how high performers hollow themselves out.
Match the day to your energy
- Monday, first thing: plan the week before the week plans you.
- Mornings: deep work, while the tank is full.
- Afternoons: meetings, quick wins and the short-term dopamine work.
- Guard the boundary: a 9am "quick call" costs a full deep-work block, not thirty minutes.
Then make it automatic: wire the cadences into your habit stacks so the workouts and walks stop depending on willpower, and score the whole system every month or two with the Human 9 to catch the domain that's quietly slipping.
What you can do right now
- Cut next week's plan to 80%. Open next week's calendar and remove or shrink commitments until a fifth of it is genuinely empty. The random 20% is coming either way — decide now that it lands in slack, not in your evenings.
- Score your seven needs out of 10. Two minutes: exercise, eating, sleep, friends & family, solitude, training, vacation. The two lowest scores are next week's calendar edits. 7 Core Founder Needs →
- Move one meeting out of tomorrow morning. Reclaim the morning for deep work and push the check-ins and quick calls to after lunch. One swap is enough to feel the difference.
- Book the slot for the work you love. If coding charges you, one afternoon a week, recurring. Treat it like an investor meeting: it doesn't move.
The toolkit
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