5 Minute Sunday · The newsletter for founders and leaders who are tired of being the bottleneck.
My son got upset : why are you still on your phone on the Beach?
I didn't have a good answer. And probably neither do you.
If your body made it to the beach chair but your brain is still running payroll, the board deck, and every fire you left behind, you already know exactly where this is going…
F, that's hard to admit. But here I am, in Edinburgh, on a break with my kids, because I got too close to needing this more than they did.
I finally listened to what that MEANT instead of scheduling around it.
Most founders and senior leaders don't get that warning right. They read exhaustion as a scheduling problem. One more system, one more delegated task, one more push, and it'll ease up. It doesn't. trust me im all about building operational systems. It compounds, quietly, until it isn't quiet anymore.
Keep pretending the beach chair counts, and eventually your body picks the moment to STOP for you. That's just how it goes.
Stay with me, because this isn't a productivity tip. It's what you need to get before the productive system.
🔑 ONE LEADERSHIP TIP
The break isn't optional. It's where the warning system lives.
The burnout conversation is louder right now than I've seen it in a while. A post this week on senior engineering leaders burning out mid-role pulled 1,600+ reactions and 157 comments. Every leader I know either wrote something like it or sent it to somebody else.
One comment in that thread: What actually breaks someone is watching leadership repeat the same strategy mistake every quarter and call it iteration. OIIIISH i bet you know how it feels as well as i do .
Nobody built in the checkpoint that would have caught it three quarters earlier.
📚 BONUS: WHO TO FOLLOW
The post that got me thinking about this.
The thread I mentioned above is worth reading in full. Gergely Orosz, who writes The Pragmatic Engineer, posted about this exact pattern and broke down why with real specificity. Worth a follow if you lead technical teams.
Here's what I actually believe. Resilience is showing up on the hard days and doing the work when nobody's watching. That part, most leaders have down. What almost nobody trains is the other skill, STOPPING long enough to ask if the hard days are still adding up to something or Im just kicking the ball in the wrong gate.
You can't ask that question mid sprint. You can only ask it in the quiet. Which is exactly the thing most leaders cut first when things get busy, the one input that would have told them sooner.
Have you seen that price already for you? Not the dramatic version. The quiet one. The extra hour of low grade dread before a Monday that used to feel fine. THe constant feeling os stress and one more thing that i have to do in bed, before tomorrow. …
I've watched this in clients for years and I still nearly missed it in myself this month. That's not a confession for sympathy. It's the point. Nobody is exempt from needing the break just because they coach other people through it.
🏢 ONE COMPANY WORTH KNOWING
Two people who stopped on purpose instead of by force.
SlingshotAI is the team behind Ash, an AI mental health app trained specifically on clinical and therapeutic data instead of general internet text. They've raised 93 million dollars to build what they call a foundation model for psychology.
It was cofounded by Neil Parikh , who had already built Casper into a household mattress brand, alongside Daniel Reid Cahn , a machine learning researcher who'd previously built AI mental health tools in the UK. He wasn't forced out by burnout. He'd already succeeded once, took the time to actually want something new, and chose to start again on his own terms.
The bonus case, for anyone who thinks it's too late to change course: Colonel Harland Sanders. Before Kentucky Fried Chicken, his twenties and thirties were a string of failed jobs and businesses. A short legal career that ended in a courtroom fight with his own client. A ferry boat startup at thirty that a new bridge made irrelevant. He was sixty five and living on a small Social Security check when he finally incorporated KFC and started driving around the country signing up franchisees himself.
His whole life was a string of pivots, one after another, until one of them finally worked. Every one of them came after he stopped long enough to admit the last thing wasn't it.
✅ ONE THING TO ACT ON
Take the two hours before you need them.
Block one to two hours while things are quieter. Phone off. No calls, no internet, no exceptions.
Write, unedited, your honest answers to these:
→ Am I actually happy, most days, doing this? → Is there something in my work I genuinely enjoy, or does it just feel like a roller coaster I'm strapped into? → Am I seeing real results, or am I waiting for a deadline to tell me it worked? → If I'm honest, do I need to change something?
Whatever comes up, don't call it failure. Call it discovery.
If the answer is leave, leave, and be proud you tried. If the answer is stay, stay, and go back with your eyes open instead of your head down.
This isn't about asking permission. It's about not finding out the hard way, months from now, that you needed this two hours a long time before you took it.
📩 TWO WAYS I CAN HELP
👉 Comment BREAK and I'll send you the framework I use with leaders who are closer to burnout than they've admitted, to figure out what actually needs to change.
If you already know something needs to shift and want help figuring out what:
🤪 Have you felt that price already? How are you dealing with the pressure right now. Genuinely curious what's actually working for you.
See you next Sunday
— Alisa
Leadify | Fractional COO · Executive Advisor
Founders come to me when they've stopped asking themselves the questions that matter.
This issue also ran on LinkedIn — join the discussion there
