Nike says Just DO IT! But Most Founders Don’t.
Updated: Aug 20
It’s finally the weekend, precisely Sunday evening, and you gave your best at work all week.
You had meetings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that lasted about 2 hours each; Tuesday was spent on a call that went way longer than expected, with four back-to-back check-ins that also took longer than expected.
Friday was spent on administrative tasks: reviewing pitch decks, approving strategies, and replying to emails. This was also supposed to be quick, but it wasn’t, and the strategy call on Tuesday? Well, the strategy didn’t work out.
You worked hard. You were busy by every measurable means, but now you are sitting with a quiet, uncomfortable question:
‘’What did you actually build this week?’’
Not what was discussed, attended, or responded to. Did those actions actually move the needle? Was there any innovation that didn’t exist on Monday morning that had been shaped by a week-long effort?
You know the answer too well, and it makes you uncomfortable. You think ahead into the new week. You can’t help but realise you’ll be going round the same circle all over again.
What Founders Think They Do
In 2006, Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria decided to conduct one of the longest studies ever to understand how leaders spent their time. They studied 27 CEOs 24 hours every single day for 13 weeks, resulting in over a decade with nearly 60,0000 hours of research.
And in 2018, they published the result of this research: they expected to find inefficiency, but they found something technically worse.
There was a huge gap between what CEOs believed they were doing and what they were actually doing. And the number of CEOs who fell into this category was enormous.
The single most common finding across all 27 executives was that these CEOs were certain they spent meaningful time with customers.
They spent lots of time on strategy, the product, the things that “mattered”, or so they thought. Data said otherwise; almost none of them did. Now, if they weren't spending time on what mattered, the question was, what then were they spending time on?
What consumed their time was internal: meetings, coordination, information management, and email, which accounted for approximately 24% of their working hours.
They thought they were spending time on what mattered; they thought they were actually doing the work, but data showed all they did was partake in discussions.
They thought they were doing the work and spending time on what mattered but data showed they were mostly attending discussions about it.
This is the founder's productivity problem.
Why Founders Confuse Shallow Work for Real Work
The most obvious explanation for talking about work instead of doing it would be poor discipline. But it is almost never that.
The brain does not reliably distinguish between planning and executing. Talking through the pitch deck feels like progress. A strategy call feels like strategic work. Sharing context on a Slack thread feels like the thinking is happening.
None of it is work.
Hubstaff's research across global teams found that employees average only 39% of tracked time in genuine deep focus, roughly two to three hours per day. The remaining 60% goes to shallow work: routine meetings, status updates, email replies, and coordination tasks.
For founders, it is worse. A huge chunk of their day disappears into meetings, threads, approvals, syncs, and responses to messages that arrived during the meeting before this one.
Asana's research confirms that 60% of knowledge workers' time is spent on coordination rather than strategic output — what Asana calls "work about work."
Talking about work instead of doing it does not feel like avoidance.
It feels like leading.
That is precisely what makes it so difficult to stop.
What Founder Productivity Actually Requires
While founders fill their days with things that do not require them, the things that do are quietly waiting.
Product decisions.
The judgment calls about what to build, what to cut, what to stop, and what to double down on. These are not thirty-minute decisions made between meetings. They require sitting for hours. Thinking past the first alternative, and the second, and the third, until something true emerges.
Deep work for founders is almost never on the calendar because it is not a recurring event. It is thinking. The kind that takes time to arrive at the right place. The kind that requires space, the packed calendar never provides.
Strategic decisions
The choices that do not feel big in the moment but determine the course of the company in three years. They almost never show up as a meeting. They live on the margin of the day, waiting for a gap that the calendar keeps closing.
This is the real cost of founder time management done wrong.
Decisions that never got made at the depth they deserved because the founder was in the Wednesday sync while the company's most important questions went unanswered at the bottom of the to-do list.
Business decisions
Every product, service, good, innovation or solution is a business. If you strip away the positioning and messaging, it all boils down to getting paid for creating a product. Founders' productivity is judged based on how much the business is getting paid, and if those metrics are not good enough, then there is a problem.
Founders need to strategise and, more importantly, execute on whatever it takes to bring revenue either through investors, partnerships, subscriptions, licensing, etc. Any kind of work that pushes the business to generate income is what a founder should be doing. Not the endless 1:1 with new interns or the janitors who need a salary advance.
The Only Founder Time Management Fix
It is not a new system, nor a better calendar management app. Not a morning routine. Not another framework.
It is one honest question asked at the start of the week instead of the end.
If you removed everything from your calendar that does not specifically require your presence, everything that could be delegated, cancelled, or handled by someone else. What would remain?
That remainder is your actual job. Everything else is evidence that the company has not yet learned to run without you when it needs to.
The original idea was to build something useful, to find purpose in making something that did not exist before and not to spend every week in a cycle of syncs and stand-ups until the original idea becomes a distant memory.
There is a product decision that has been deferred for six weeks.
A strategic bet that has never had time to breathe.
A thing only the founder can do, that has been waiting patiently at the bottom of the calendar for a gap that never comes. The gap will not arrive on its own. It has to be built brick by brick with no interference from meetings that never end.
The Question That Has Been Rescheduled
It is Sunday evening again, and the calendar for Monday is already full. The question from last Sunday, the one about what actually moved, what actually got made, has not been answered.
It has been rescheduled.
One wonders when it will get a slot.
If it ever will.
