Founder Overwhelm: What Leaders Who Pause Do Differently
Some of the most capable founders I coach have the hardest time doing something that sounds deceptively simple: stopping long enough to think.
One founder I coach runs a 40-person B2B software company in Berlin. In our last session, she walked me through her previous week: Slack replies during her daughter's swim lesson, an investor update rewritten twice on the train, a hiring call taken while walking between two other meetings, and a pricing decision she'd been putting off since August.
She'd been online from six every morning. By Friday, she couldn't name one decision she felt good about. When we opened her calendar together, there wasn't a single block longer than 30 minutes without a meeting or a message.
That's founder overwhelm: constant motion, very little thinking space, and the nagging feeling that you're working harder than ever without making enough progress on what matters.
Shawn Vanderhoven and @Anne Vanderhoven's new book, Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World, explores precisely this challenge. It puts a name to a pattern I see week after week in my coaching sessions and offers practical ways for leaders to reclaim their focus without losing momentum.
Although the book is written primarily for leaders in larger organizations, I think founders have a particular reason to pay attention. Here's why.
What Founder Overwhelm Looks Like
Founder overwhelm rarely arrives as a crisis. In my sessions, it usually looks like someone who is always reachable and always moving, and who has slowly lost confidence in their own judgment.
The signs I hear most often are:
Replying to messages within minutes, at any hour, because a slow reply feels like a risk.
Back-to-back meetings with no time to prepare for any of them.
Big decisions pushed to “next week” for months.
A team that waits for the founder’s sign-off on small things.
Feeling busy from morning to night and struggling to say what moved forward.
This matters for the company as much as for the founder.
In his 2007 essay How Not to Die, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham wrote that when startups die, the official cause is usually running out of money or a founder leaving. He believed the underlying cause was often that founders had become demoralized.
Founders know the pressure is taking a toll. When Balderton Capital surveyed 230 founders of venture-backed companies, 88% agreed that excessive stress can lead to poor decision-making.
Beyond a certain point, longer hours start to hurt decision-making and creativity, and can tip into burnout.
I find that figure telling. Most founders already sense the problem. What they need is a practical way to do something about it.
Why Speed Becomes the Default
I understand the pull toward speed.
When you’ve built something from nothing, every unanswered message can feel like a small threat to the business. In the early days, moving fast often is what keeps a company alive.
You do what needs to be done, take the call, solve the problem, and keep going.
The trouble is that the habit stays long after the company has outgrown it.
The wider working world isn't helping. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index, which analyzed Microsoft 365 activity across 31,000 workers in 31 markets, found that people are interrupted every two minutes during core working hours, around 275 times a day, by meetings, emails, and chat notifications. The same research found that 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls without a calendar invitation.
Founders tend to sit at the center of that traffic, receiving more of it and generating a good share of it themselves.
And every interruption costs more than the minute it takes.
Sophie Leroy, a professor at the University of Washington, coined the term attention residue in a 2009 study. Her research found that when people switch from one task to another, part of their attention remains stuck on the previous task, affecting their performance on the next one.
Think about a founder moving from a pricing discussion to a hiring call to a board preparation session in the space of an hour. They may be physically present in each conversation, but mentally, they're still carrying pieces of the last one.
Over time, this becomes the founder's operating rhythm. And from there, it becomes the company's.
What Pause Reveals About Leadership
Shawn Vanderhoven and Anne Vanderhoven spent three years studying leaders who manage to create focus and strong results in fast-moving environments. Their research covers more than 150 major companies, including Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn.
One of the book's headline findings is striking: according to the authors, teams led by people who pause spend three times as much time on their biggest projects, even amid competing demands.
The book sets out 12 leadership practices for deliberately slowing down so teams can move faster on what matters most.
Among other things, the authors explore how leaders can:
Protect focus by changing distracting messaging habits.
Build momentum by turning vague goals into clear targets.
Make hidden workloads visible so people can manage their time and priorities.
Turn rumination over mistakes into confidence and learning.
In a conversation on the FranklinCovey On Leadership podcast, Shawn describes how managers become overcommitted and hooked on activity, then unintentionally pass that busyness down to their teams. He also discusses how AI is raising expectations even further.
Although Pause is written mainly for leaders in larger organizations, I think founders have a particular reason to read it.
Shawn has founder experience himself. Before moving into leadership development, he scaled his family's software business 30-fold.
What I particularly like about the book is that it doesn't treat slowing down as a vague wellbeing aspiration. It offers practical ways to change how work gets done. Several of its ideas have already found their way into my coaching conversations.
The Distractors That Take Over Your Agenda
One of the most useful things about Pause is how specifically it identifies the habits that fill a leader's week, and their team's, without anyone consciously deciding they should.
Most are small and often well-intentioned. The ones I recognize most in my founder coaching are these.
1. The constant ping
An endless stream of emails and messages, often copied to more people than need them. The answer isn't simply to tell everyone to ignore notifications. Teams need to agree on better communication habits together.
2. The “five minutes” request
In a conversation with Suzanne Weller, Shawn discusses the request that will only take five minutes. It's difficult to refuse, and rarely takes five minutes.
His suggestion is simple: before adding something to someone's plate, ask what they're already working on.
3. Unclear priorities
When goals remain vague, people spread their effort across everything. Managers and founders can make matters worse by encouraging teams to take on more without being clear about what matters most.
4. Hidden workload
Requests arrive through side conversations, Slack messages, emails, and quick calls. They never make it into a plan, so nobody has a complete picture of how much work is already underway.
5. The always-on culture
Shawn shares the story of a leader who realized he'd built a team that operated like a store that never closes: always open and always reachable. Eventually, people stopped doing their best work.
6. Permission without protection
Telling people they're allowed to focus isn't enough. Under pressure, they'll often abandon that focus to demonstrate that they're working hard.
Shawn contrasts this with actively sponsoring focus: the leader uses their own authority and credibility to protect the time and conditions people need to do good work.
When I shared this list with my client in Berlin, she recognized herself in almost every point. Not just as the person receiving the messages, but as the person sending them.
That was the interesting part. The problem wasn't simply that her business demanded too much of her. Some of the demands were habits she had helped create.
That's not a criticism. Founders often build these habits while trying to keep a young business alive. The important question is whether those habits are still serving the business they're running today.
Urgent Versus Important
Most of these distractions win because they feel urgent.
Dwight Eisenhower drew a distinction between urgent and important in a 1954 speech. Stephen Covey later popularized the four-quadrant matrix in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
It's a familiar framework, but worth revisiting when your calendar is running your life.
Urgent and important: Crises, deadlines, and the customer about to churn. Do these.
Important but not urgent: Strategy, hiring well, your co-founder relationship, and your health. Schedule these.
Urgent but not important: Other people's priorities arriving with someone else's deadline. Delegate these.
Neither urgent nor important: Busywork that feels productive because it's easy to finish. Drop these.
For founders, the second category deserves particular attention.
Strategy doesn't usually send reminders. Neither does succession planning, building a strong leadership team, or thinking carefully about your next market. Your health rarely interrupts a meeting to demand attention.
These things are easy to postpone because nothing immediately breaks when you do.
But postpone them long enough, and the consequences become very real.
A founder can spend an entire week responding to urgent requests and still make little progress on the decisions that will determine the company's future. They can also become the bottleneck, because the team is waiting for their input on everything while the founder has no time to think through the bigger questions.
Pause makes a similar point: leaders need to distinguish between genuine urgency and the noise that crowds out important work.
The cost of getting this wrong is significant. In a McKinsey survey of 1,259 managers, respondents said they spent 37% of their working time making decisions, and 61% said most of that time was used ineffectively.
These were managers in large organizations, with teams and resources around them. In a startup, many of the same decisions land on one person's desk.
That's all the more reason to protect the time needed to make them well.
How Founders Pass Busyness Down
In a small company, the founder's pace becomes everyone's pace very quickly.
A Slack message sent at 11 p.m., even with “no rush” at the end, signals that late-night communication is part of the working environment. A founder who changes priorities in every meeting teaches people to wait for the next change before committing to anything.
A founder who makes every decision personally teaches the team to escalate rather than exercise judgment.
And a founder who rewards immediate responses, consciously or otherwise, can create a culture in which people prioritize looking busy over doing meaningful work.
Daniel Pink, endorsing Pause, describes the “invisible wake of digital detritus” managers leave behind for their teams. I see the same pattern in founder-led businesses, often in a more pronounced form because there are fewer layers between the founder and everyone else.
Founders seem to recognize their responsibility here, too. In the same Balderton research, 90% of founders said it was their responsibility to set the tone for a company where people can look after their wellbeing.
That's a considerable responsibility for someone who may not have had a quiet hour in weeks.
And it's worth remembering that culture isn't shaped only by what a founder says in an all-hands meeting. It's shaped by the everyday behaviors people see, the expectations they infer, and the things they learn will earn them approval.
If you want your team to think strategically, make decisions independently, and focus on their most important work, you have to create the conditions for them to do so.
That starts with how you work yourself.
Five Ways Founders Can Pause This Week
You don't need a retreat, a sabbatical, or a week off to start changing your working habits. Small, deliberate adjustments can make a meaningful difference.
Here are five practices I use with founder clients, some inspired by the ideas in Pause.
1. Schedule your messages as carefully as your meetings.
If you do your best thinking late at night, write your messages then and schedule them to arrive the next morning. Your team gets your ideas without learning that they should be online at midnight.
Agree on which channels are appropriate for urgent matters and what genuinely requires an immediate response. Not every message deserves the same level of attention.
2. Book one thinking block a week and protect it like a board meeting.
Start with 90 minutes. Put your phone in another room and turn off notifications.
Use the time for the decision you've been putting off, the strategy question you haven't had room to consider, or the problem that needs more than a quick answer.
Many founders I work with start with Friday mornings, when some of the week's noise has settled. The exact time matters less than making the space non-negotiable.
3. Turn one fuzzy goal into a clear target.
“Grow the enterprise pipeline” gives a team very little to work with.
“Ten qualified enterprise conversations by the end of November” gives people something concrete to aim for. It also makes it easier to decide which activities deserve their time and which can wait.
Clarity reduces unnecessary work. It helps people make decisions without constantly returning to the founder for direction.
4. Ask your team what's really on their plate.
Ask each team lead to list everything they're working on, including requests that came through side channels and commitments that never made it into the project plan.
Then look at the list together. What matters most? What can wait? What should stop altogether?
You may be surprised by how much hidden work has accumulated, including work your own requests have created.
5. Pause before responding to anything that feels urgent.
Ask yourself two questions: Does this need me? Does it need me today?
When something goes wrong, take ten minutes to debrief with the people involved. What happened? What did we learn? What will we change?
This helps turn mistakes into useful information rather than something you replay in your head at 2 a.m.
The goal isn't to become slower at everything. It's to stop treating everything as equally urgent, so you can give the important things the attention they deserve.
Before You Open Your Inbox Again
If you're a founder reading this between two meetings, I know how difficult it can be to slow down when so much depends on you.
You may have investors to update, customers to keep happy, people to hire, cash flow to manage, and a dozen decisions waiting for your attention. Some of those demands are unavoidable.
But not all of them need to be handled immediately. And not every problem is best solved by you doing more.
Start with one of the practices above and give it two weeks. Pay attention to the quality of your decisions, the work your team gets done, and what happens when you're not setting the pace with every message.
You don't have to figure this out alone, either. When RHR International surveyed CEOs, half said they felt lonely in the role, and most of those said the loneliness affected their performance. A coach, a peer group, or a fellow founder who asks good questions can help you step back and see things differently.
And if you want to explore the ideas further, Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World is a practical place to start.
I'll leave you with four questions to consider:
When did you last spend an hour thinking about your business without checking your phone?
Which of your working habits has your team picked up, and would you want them to keep it?
What decision have you been rushing that deserves more time? And what have you been postponing that deserves less?
If your company moved at the pace of your best thinking, what would be different by the end of the year?
You built your business to create something. Make sure you leave yourself enough time to think about what you're building, why it matters, and what needs to happen next.
Sometimes the most productive thing a founder can do is stop long enough to work out what deserves their attention in the first place.
References
Vanderhoven, S. and Vanderhoven, A. (2026). Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World. Simon Element (US) / Transworld (UK). Publisher page
Weller, S. (2026). Tapping the Brakes. Reimagine Growth.
FranklinCovey On Leadership podcast. Shawn Vanderhoven: Pause to Lead Brilliant Work
The Wiseman Group. Shawn Vanderhoven profile
Balderton Capital (2023). Start-up founders under greater pressure than ever as research reveals diminishing returns from ever increasing hours
The Next Web (2023). European VC invests in wellbeing and performance platform for founders
Graham, P. (2007). How Not to Die
McKinsey & Company (2019). Decision making in the age of urgency
Saporito, T. J. (2012). It's Time to Acknowledge CEO Loneliness. Harvard Business Review.
Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.
Microsoft Work Trend Index (2025), via HR Executive. Breaking down the infinite workday
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181.
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