I didn’t realize I was walking into burnout.
For the last few years, I have been leading managers and senior ICs across seven teams in multiple countries. Then one of my managers left—and I stepped in to take over their team directly. Suddenly I was doing all the tactical work of a line manager on top of my strategic responsibilities as a senior leader.

At first, I tried to do it all. For a while, it looked like it was working. But then the cracks showed up: I was canceling 1:1s, struggling to make decisions, distracted in meetings, getting migraines, and sleeping poorly.

That’s when I realized: it wasn’t a time management problem. It was an energy management problem.

Leadership Burns Energy, Fast

Engineering leadership isn’t a passive role. It demands focus, empathy, judgment, and often emotional resilience. Every meeting, every trade-off, every tough conversation—it all draws from your internal reserves. And unlike time, energy is variable. It’s renewable, but it depletes quickly without care.

The Effectiveness Formula

For leadership, we can think about our effectiveness as a function of three things: knowledge, time, and energy.

In chemistry, a reaction only proceeds as long as its critical component exists in sufficient quantities—the limiting reagent. Even if every other ingredient is abundant, when that one runs out, the reaction stalls.

Knowledge and context can be acquired. Time is finite, but is a well-known constraint that can be managed and planned for. Energy however is variable and can be unpredictable. In leadership, energy is our limiting reagent.

You can have a clear calendar, perfect documentation, and a capable team. But if your energy is tapped out, your leadership stalls. You’ll struggle to make decisions, lead conversations, or even think clearly. Time and information alone can’t compensate.

All the time in the world won’t deliver you an effective strategy if you have no creative energy left to ideate. Weekly 1:1s won’t develop an employee if you don’t have the emotional bandwidth for empathy and insight.

Common Energy Drains to Watch For

Not all work costs the same. Here are some high-drain activities many engineering leaders face:

• High-engagement meetings. These include anything where you need to be fully “on”—like 1:1s, facilitating a tough discussion, or working through a complex technical topic in real time. These aren’t bad—they’re necessary—but they’re expensive. Don’t stack them too tightly. I find I can do a max of three 1:1s per day, but that could be less depending on what other high-engagement meetings I have planned.

• Meeting overload. A day packed with meetings leaves no room for deep work. This usually leads to one of two outcomes—both bad: either your work spills into early mornings and evenings, or you start multitasking in meetings. The former is a recipe for burnout and personal struggles, both of which will impact the quality of your work (though by the time this is apparent, you will have bigger concerns than work!). The latter means you are simply ineffective. Which might leave you asking the question “why am I even going to all these meetings anyway?”

• Context switching. Jumping between projects or modes of thinking is draining. Running a staff meeting requires different mental muscles than mentoring a junior dev. If you switch gears too often or too fast, your mental performance drops—even if you don’t notice it right away.

• Back-to-back scheduling. No buffer means no time to process or follow up. Over time, this leads to fatigue and execution gaps. Also a fully utilized schedule means you’re unable to respond to emergent issues without impacting the effectiveness of your entire organization! While not specifically an energy management technique, buffer in your schedule is an important time-management tool.

Strategies to Manage Your Energy

Once you recognize your energy as the limiting reagent, the next step is protecting it. That doesn’t mean being selfish or rigid—it means being intentional. Here are some real-world strategies that work for me.

Strategies to Protect and Invest Your Energy

• Do less, on purpose. You can’t do everything. More importantly, you can’t do everything well. Doing too much ultimately means underperforming in all areas. To perform well at the most important activities, decide what really needs your full energy and more importantly decide what you won’t give your attention to. Maybe that means shifting some 1:1s to every other week, or letting a less important project run with less involvement. Make deliberate trade-offs. As always, clear communication is your friend here: let stakeholders know your priorities and the trade-offs involved. Be open to feedback, but stick to your guns about doing less.

• Learn yourself. Pay attention to your natural energy rhythms—not just when you’re tired, but also when you’re at your best. Taking breaks is important, but so is aligning your deep work with your peak energy. For example, I find my best deep focus time is first thing in the morning until around 11 a.m.—that’s when I do strategic planning or work on communication plans. I also tend to get a second wind around 4 p.m., which is a great window for creative problem-solving. I find my energy trough is around 3:30 p.m., so I usually schedule a break. I will read, walk, or catch up with my family during this time. Understanding these patterns helps me schedule the right work at the right time, and keeps my energy aligned with my priorities.

• Tend the tool. Leadership is cognitive and emotional labor—and that means physical and mental resources matter. Do things that replenish energy and use your energy more intentionally. Eat. Hydrate. Move. Learn to recognize signals that your energy is waning or that you’re burning too bright. Beware of sugar and caffeine. They push you through now but crash you later. Worse, the effects make it difficult to rest or sleep when your body needs it, making it hard to replenish your energy.

Prioritize with Purpose

You can also focus on how you prioritize work. I find the Eisenhower Matrix helpful for sorting tasks by urgency and importance—so I can focus on what truly matters, delegate what I can, and drop the rest.

• Delegate and systematize. Not everything needs your direct oversight. Build systems that help others manage themselves, and delegate clearly. Fewer open loops means less mental overhead for you. The bonus is that this creates up an effective team around you, meaning that eventually you need less energy by running a sustainable, resilient organization.

• Actively manage your calendar. Block time for follow-ups or focused work, and treat that time as sacred. When people want to schedule over it, make it an active conversation. This lightens your cognitive load—you don’t have to remember everything, because it’s written down and protected. There is also a subtle energizing shift in being an active participant in how your time is spent.

• Do the damn thing. A friend of mine’s father owned a successful local grocery. One of his rules for himself was “if it takes less than five minutes, just do it.” Sometimes the most energy-efficient move is action. Avoiding tiny tasks burns more mental fuel than just doing them. Just do the damn thing.

Leading from a Full Tank

When you start managing energy—not just time—you’ll feel the shift. Your days become less frantic. In high-pressure situations, you’ll find yourself operating with more mental stillness and clarity. That clarity leads to better decisions, more intentional leadership, and clearer direction for your team.

Energy management isn’t indulgent. It’s foundational. Treat energy like the rate-limiting reagent it is and when your team needs real leadership, you’ll have the capacity to deliver it.

Communicating schedule changes to my team and stakeholders wasn’t comfortable—but it made all the difference in my ability to lead well. When you protect your energy, you show up as the leader your team needs.

Where is your energy going today—and is it where it matters most?

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash