Achieving Work-Life Balance

Does a successful career mean always on, always connected? For most founders, the answer is a quiet “no.”

Accenture found that work-life balance, not money, not recognition, not even autonomy, decides whether people call a career successful. More than half of men and women rank it first. That is worth sitting with.

Poor balance drains you. It shows up as fatigue, in body and mood. Productivity slips. Your reputation frays at the edges. Relationships strain. You make costly errors. You miss the things you can’t rebook, like a kid’s recital.

Some founders think sleep fixes this. Sleep repairs the body. It doesn’t clear the mental load of running everything at once. Real rest needs more: activities that pull your mind off work entirely. When the mind is tired, the body tires faster. Heart and muscles still perform, but the brain is asking to stop, and the same effort feels heavier.

Four ways to build a better balance:

1. Carve out “get things done” time

Some days you sprint meeting to meeting, watch the hours vanish, then work late to catch up. What you need is room to breathe and do the work itself.

Jeff Weiner, then CEO of LinkedIn, blocked 90 minutes to two hours of nothing on his calendar every day, split into shorter chunks. It gave him uninterrupted time to think and clear the pile before it grew. Shorter meetings help too. Mark Cuban’s rule is blunt: a meeting worth attending has a set length and a set outcome before you agree to go. Facebook ran “No Meeting Wednesdays” so everyone got one day to own their schedule.

If your day disappears before you start, beating procrastination and tightening your meetings buy back more hours than any app.

2. Schedule your downtime first

When you plan the week, block time for family, friends, and recharging before anything else. Skip that step and the time evaporates.

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, treats family time as fixed and tells colleagues when he will drop everything for home. I saw the same in a company president I advise: two hours every week for his daughter’s dance lesson, phone off, no exceptions, whatever is on fire.

3. Claim time for yourself

Stop spending energy on gossip, negativity, and tasks you could hand off. Put it into exercise instead. A workout cuts stress, keeps you healthy, and hands you quiet time to think a problem through.

Frits Van Paaschen, then CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, ran a business spanning dozens of countries and still woke early to exercise on the road. It cleared his head. Consider handing off the errands and chores that eat your evenings, even on a tight budget. The time back can be worth the cost.

4. Unplug completely

Technology keeps us reachable around the clock. To rest and see the bigger picture, you have to step off the daily operations.

Jim Moffatt of Deloitte Consulting found that stepping fully away pushed him to think about the long term, and gave him his family back. John Donahoe, then CEO of eBay, rejected the idea that a leader must be a connected warrior every day of the year. He stayed reachable most of the year and went dark for two full weeks. Phil Libin of Evernote does everything but work when he travels: movies, books, sleep, daydreaming. He looks forward to trips because they hand him that space.

The urge to always be producing can blind you to the life the work was supposed to buy. Libin’s habit works because it protects the one thing a full calendar never will: room to think.