After my episode about the always-on leader, my inbox and DMs on LinkedIn filled up with some version of the same message.
“Alex, I get it. I agree. I don’t want to live like this anymore. But what do I actually do, every day, so I don’t end up there in the first place?”
It’s a great question. Because knowing that constant availability is exhausting doesn’t change anything about your Tuesday.
So this article is not about the crisis response. It’s about prevention. And I want to be upfront with you from the start: there is no single big boundary that fixes this. What works is a handful of small, repetitive, honestly quite boring habits that together stop exhaustion from building up.
Exhaustion Doesn’t Arrive. It Accumulates.
Here’s why exhaustion sneaks up on capable tech leaders specifically. It rarely shows up as one dramatic event. It shows up as one skipped lunch. One skipped bio break. One late-night Slack message you answered “just this once”. One meeting that could have been a five-minute async update.
None of it feels significant on its own. And the data says this is now the norm, not the exception. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index special report on the “infinite workday” found that meetings after 8 PM are up 16% year over year, the average employee sends or receives more than 50 messages outside core hours, and by 10 PM nearly a third of active workers are back in their inbox.
Because every single moment feels small and manageable, most leaders don’t notice the pattern until they’re deep in it. And then the fix is usually dramatic: a full digital detox, a forced vacation, a breakdown. Or your child standing next to your desk asking, “Can you just get up from the computer and play with me?”
Dramatic fixes work for about two weeks. Then the habits that never actually changed quietly rebuild the exact same problem.
I was there. I promise you. For me, the wake-up call came through my health, and it was the moment I started treating my body and my mind seriously.
The leaders who don’t end up there don’t have better willpower or more motivation. They’re just doing boring reps.
You Already Have a Contract With Yourself. You’ve Just Never Read It.
In my work with tech leaders, I use contracting from Transactional Analysis all the time: making expectations explicit, so nobody has to guess. Most leaders use some version of it with their teams. Almost nobody applies it inward.
Instead, we negotiate with ourselves all day long. We know we should move more, drink water, eat lunch, close the laptop. We don’t need more knowledge. We need fewer negotiations.
“I’ll just answer this one message.” “Just one quick call.” That’s an unspoken agreement with yourself, and it’s exactly as corrosive as an unspoken agreement with a team member. The only difference? There’s just one person holding it accountable, which makes it so much easier to break.
The fix is the same mechanism you’d use with your team: make it explicit. “I should probably disconnect more” is a wish. And hope is not a strategy. A contract sounds like this:
- I don’t open Slack / Teams before 8 AM.
- I take a real lunch, away from my desk, four days a week.
- I end my day by naming the one thing I’m intentionally leaving unfinished. (Yes, this one can be painful.)
A contract with yourself, like a contract with anyone else, only works if it’s specific enough to know whether you kept it.
And no, switching off won’t make you less committed. Sabine Sonnentag’s research on psychological detachment shows that people who mentally disconnect from work after hours are more satisfied with life and show fewer signs of strain, without being any less engaged at work. Even the humble lunch break counts: a study from the Rotman School of Management found that freely chosen, relaxing lunch breaks led to the least fatigue at the end of the day. The key word is chosen. That’s exactly what a contract turns your default into: a choice.
How to Build Habits That Survive a Release Week
Here is the part you can use today.
- Pick three habits, not ten. Overloading the list is how most self-improvement efforts quietly die within two weeks. That’s why New Year’s resolutions so often fail: they’re too big and too far from what we already do every day.
- Make them yes or no. The test: could you report back tomorrow with “yes, I did it” or “no, I didn’t”? If the answer needs a paragraph, the habit is too vague.
- Glue each habit to one you already have. “Before I open my laptop, I…” or “Right after my last meeting, I…” works far better than “sometime in the evening, once everything on my list is done” (because that moment never comes). Psychologists call these if-then plans implementation intentions, and a meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Sheeran across 94 tests found they have a medium-to-large effect on actually reaching your goals. BJ Fogg builds his whole Tiny Habits method on the same idea and calls it an anchor.
- Run a five-minute weekly audit. Did you keep your three agreements this week? If not, was it a one-off situation or a pattern? A pattern is a signal to adjust the habit itself, not to feel guilty about it.
Be patient with yourself, too. In the well-known UCL study on habit formation, it took participants 66 days on average for a new behaviour to become automatic, with a huge range between people. And the study found that missing a single day didn’t derail the process. One bad Thursday is not a failed contract.
Your Team Learns From Your Habits, Not Your Policy
One more thing, because you lead people. You can write the best “no Slack after 6 PM” team agreement in the world. Your engineers will still learn the real rule from the timestamps on your messages.
That’s why I see Communication Intelligence as something that starts with the conversation you have with yourself. Your habits are a message, whether you send it on purpose or not. And if you work remotely, this matters even more, because work is home and home is work.
Boundaries don’t make you lazy or disengaged. Not as an engineering manager, not as a CTO, and not as a founder either. If you get sick, in your body or in your mind, you won’t be able to do anything for your team, your clients, or your product. It’s just like that.
If you suspect you’re already past the prevention stage, read about shadow burnout, the version that hides behind still hitting your targets. And if your contracts keep breaking because new requests keep landing on your plate, start with saying no as a leadership skill.
The Bottom Line
Exhaustion usually isn’t one big failure of willpower. It’s a hundred small, unstated agreements you broke with yourself, without even noticing you’d made them.
So, here’s my question for you: which three agreements would you be willing to check tomorrow morning, with a simple yes or no?
Want the full conversation? Listen to episode #201 of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. And if you want the blueprint (case studies, checklists, and tools on the habits of leaders that you can copy straight into your leadership life), grab my book From Code to People.
