# 4-Week Burnout Recovery Protocol ## Executive Assessment & Triage **Current state:** You are working roughly 14-16 hours a day, with 10 of them in back-to-back video calls. There is no time to think, recover, or decide, only to react. Three simultaneous launches mean you are the bottleneck for all of them, so every decision queues behind a calendar with no gaps. **Your symptoms are a pattern, not a character flaw.** Insomnia, brain fog, irritability, and Slack-ping anxiety are what a nervous system looks like when it never gets a recovery window. Context switching across three launches compounds this, because each switch carries a cognitive cost you never get to pay down. **Immediate risks:** - **Decision quality:** brain fog on three launches raises the odds of a costly miss. - **Team damage:** snapping at people erodes trust and makes them stop bringing you problems early. - **Health:** sustained sleep deprivation rarely corrects itself. If insomnia continues past Week 2, see a physician or sleep specialist. This plan supports recovery but does not replace medical care. **Your delegation assets:** a Chief of Staff (gatekeeping), a VP of Product (decision authority), and an external marketing agency (execution capacity). These are enough to take you out of the critical path, but only if you give them real authority. ## The 4-Week Recovery Roadmap ### Week 1: Immediate Decompression & Elimination *Start Monday, October 26.* - **Cancel or decline 50% of recurring meetings today.** Have your Chief of Staff audit every recurring invite. Any meeting where you are an observer, where a summary would do, or where someone else can decide gets dropped or sent to a delegate. - **Cap meetings at 5 hours per day, with 15-minute gaps.** Convert all 60-minute meetings to 45 and all 30-minute meetings to 20. Back-to-back is no longer an option. - **Enforce a hard stop at 7 PM.** No email after 7 PM, and none before 7 AM. Email you cannot answer by then waits until morning, and you can tolerate that. - **Mute Slack except for a short named list.** Turn off all notifications and check Slack at three fixed times (for example 10:30, 2:00, 5:00). Your Chief of Staff and VP of Product get a direct phone line for true emergencies only. - **Hold a 30-minute triage call with your VP of Product and Chief of Staff.** Rank the three launches by revenue impact and deadline. Decide which one you personally own, which one the VP runs day-to-day, and whether one can slip two to three weeks. ### Week 2: Boundary Establishment - **Establish daily blackout blocks.** These go on your calendar as busy, and your Chief of Staff defends them: - **Deep work:** 9:00-11:00 AM, no meetings, no Slack. - **Midday reset:** 1:00-1:45 PM, away from screens, with a real lunch and a walk. - **Evening shutdown:** 7:00 PM onward, with devices out of the bedroom by 10 PM. - **Publish communication rules to your team.** Tell them plainly: urgent means phone call, important means Slack with a response expected within 4 hours, everything else goes to a daily written digest. Without rules, everything feels urgent. - **Move to one decision forum per launch per week.** Replace ad-hoc check-ins with a single 30-minute weekly decision meeting for each launch, with a written agenda and pre-reads. Decisions that don't need you are made without you. - **Protect the weekend.** One full day off per week with no work email or Slack. Your Chief of Staff screens anything truly critical. - **Start a sleep-recovery routine.** Keep a consistent wake time, avoid screens for the hour before bed, and write down tomorrow's top three priorities before you shut down so they stop circling at night. ### Week 3: Delegation & Systemization - **Chief of Staff: owns your calendar, inbox triage, and meeting prep.** They approve or decline all new meeting requests against your rules, draft replies to routine email, and send you a one-page daily brief of only what needs your judgment. - **VP of Product: runs two of the three launches day-to-day.** They hold the authority to make product and scope decisions below an agreed threshold (define it in writing: budget, timeline slip, customer-facing changes). They escalate only above it. - **Marketing agency: owns launch communications execution.** Give them a single point of contact (the VP of Product or a marketing lead), weekly deliverable reviews, and pre-approved messaging guardrails so they stop waiting on you. - **Write a one-page decision-rights document per launch.** For each: what you decide, what the VP decides, what the agency decides, and what triggers escalation. This is what makes delegation stick. - **Build a weekly launch dashboard.** One page per launch with status, risks, and decisions needed, so you can read the state in 5 minutes instead of sitting through status calls. ### Week 4: Sustainable Re-entry - **Set your permanent meeting ceiling at 5-6 hours per day.** Any new recurring meeting requires dropping an existing one. - **Keep the deep-work block and the 7 PM shutdown as standing rules.** These are the load-bearing parts of the plan, so treat them as part of the job, not as perks. - **Run a Friday 20-minute self-check.** Rate your sleep, mood, and irritability from 1 to 10. If two or more metrics decline for two consecutive weeks, cut meetings further and escalate to a professional. - **Review delegation with your team.** Ask the VP, Chief of Staff, and agency what is working, where they are still blocked on you, and which decisions you are still taking that you shouldn't be. - **Schedule recovery in advance.** Book a long weekend within the next 8 weeks and block it now. A future recovery period you haven't scheduled won't happen. ## Non-Negotiable Daily Rules - **No email or Slack before 7 AM or after 7 PM.** Devices charge outside the bedroom. - **Two protected blocks every day:** 2 hours of deep work in the morning and a 45-minute midday break away from screens. - **A maximum of 5 hours of meetings, with a 15-minute buffer between any two.** If a request breaks this rule, the answer is no or "send me a written update." - **Check Slack only at three scheduled times.** Emergencies come by phone through your Chief of Staff. ## Delegation Matrix | Task / Commitment | Action (Drop/Delegate/Defer) | Assignee | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Recurring status meetings where you are an observer | Drop | n/a (replace with written summaries) | | Calendar management and new meeting approvals | Delegate | Chief of Staff | | Inbox triage and routine email replies | Delegate | Chief of Staff | | Daily launch status reports | Delegate | Chief of Staff, compiled from the dashboard | | Day-to-day management of Launch 2 and Launch 3 | Delegate | VP of Product | | Product and scope decisions below the agreed threshold | Delegate | VP of Product | | Launch campaign execution, asset production, and channel management | Delegate | External marketing agency | | Agency approvals within pre-set messaging guardrails | Delegate | VP of Product (or a marketing lead) | | Lowest-priority launch, if the deadline allows | Defer 2-3 weeks | You and VP of Product (decide in Week 1 triage) | | Highest-stakes launch (Launch 1) | Keep, with a weekly decision meeting only | You | | Ad-hoc Slack questions | Drop/Defer (batch into the daily digest) | Chief of Staff routes | **One last note:** the plan only works if you stop re-entering the work you delegate. Your first week will feel uncomfortable, and that is the sign it's working. If sleep and irritability haven't improved by the end of Week 2, please talk to a doctor.