Work Hard, Rest Hard

When I lived in Beijing, working on a social media app, we had our backs against the wall. Our original product wasn't getting traction, and we needed to completely rebuild before our next funding round. We had three months.

What followed was what the gaming industry infamously calls "crunch time" - a period where I worked 10-12 hours daily, seven days a week. We shipped the app. We got the funding. And then I took two weeks off to recover, barely able to look at a screen.

That experience taught me something crucial about leadership and organizational change: sustained peak performance isn't about constantly pushing harder - it's about finding the right rhythm between intensity and recovery.

Just like athletes need recovery between training sessions, organizations need breaks between periods of intense change. Weekends exists, of course. But I think that it’s important to also find a sustainable rhythm in your organization.

This is especially important when leading people. High performers can handle learning new skills while maintaining their regular workload - many even crave it - but only for a while. Push too long without a break, and even your strongest team members will start to falter.

When teams ignore these recovery periods, the warning signs start to appear. I've seen it play out multiple times: sick leaves increase, deadlines slip, and those one-on-ones with key employees keep getting rescheduled. The most serious sign is people leaving, but when that happens it has already gone too far.

These days, as an independent consultant, I schedule regular deload phases into my work. After periods of intense focus, I take a week to explore things that energize me. While it might look like "not real work" from the outside, these weeks consistently yield new insights and creative solutions I wouldn't have found otherwise.

This same principle scales beautifully to larger organizations. A CTO I recently spoke with, leading engineering at a billion-SEK company, implements this through week-long hackathons. Their teams use these weeks to explore strategically important areas like AI and analytics, or to prototype solutions to customer problems. It's the same concept as my personal deload weeks - creating space for creativity and recovery - just adapted to a larger scale.

The most successful organizations I've seen build these recovery rhythms into their annual cycle. Summer holidays and end-of-year breaks serve as natural deload phases at the organizational level. But smart leaders go further, using these periods strategically. Summer becomes a time to reflect on the first half of the year and plan for autumn's initiatives. December's slower pace creates space for annual retrospectives and setting the next year's direction. These aren't just breaks - they're essential reset points that prevent organizational burnout and enable sustained performance.

While the format of these recovery periods can vary, one thing remains constant: their success depends heavily on clear communication. When implementing these phases, I'm explicit with everyone - team members and stakeholders alike - about expectations. Are we delaying any releases? Which meetings will be postponed? What outcomes do we expect? Getting alignment on these questions upfront prevents confusion and protects the team's recovery time.

What matters is finding a cadence that works for you, your team and your company. Then protecting it fiercely. This might mean quarterly hackdays, regular exploration time, or simply building in space for tinkering between major projects. The goal isn't to work less, but to work better.

Remember, the most successful teams aren't the ones that can sprint the fastest - they're the ones that can maintain their pace over the long haul. And that only happens when you make recovery as much a priority as performance.