Most leaders I talk to are busy from the first meeting to the last email, and they still end the week feeling like the important work never happened. I’ve had plenty of those weeks.
When I booked Dr. Christian Poensgen for Transform Your Workplace, his team flagged two scheduling details. He’s nine hours ahead of me, and he has dinner with his family at six o’clock sharp. We recorded early in my morning so he’d be done well before then.
That detail stayed with me because of where Christian started. He earned his PhD studying stress and performance. Then, fresh out of school, he launched a startup. Within a few months, it was wearing him down, and he came close to burning out. He worked 80-hour weeks. He slept seven or eight hours a night and woke up exhausted anyway. He meditated and took vacations, and none of it fixed the problem.
“Every morning I would feel like the day was already lost,” he told me.
Christian is now an executive coach and the co-author, with Eric Partaker, of Ultraproductive. It’s a book about personal performance. Reading it as someone who leads people, I kept coming back to a different point. The way you work becomes the way your team works. If you want a team that does its best work without running itself down, your own habits are the first place to look.
What Pseudo-Productive Busyness Looks Like at Work
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, describes pseudo-productivity as using visible activity as a stand-in for real output. Christian and Eric build on that idea with a term of their own: pseudo-productive busyness.
Most leaders will recognize it. Meetings and messages fill the day. The work that needs quiet, uninterrupted attention gets pushed to evenings and weekends, or it doesn’t get done at all. That was Christian’s startup life. He was putting in more hours than ever and getting less of what mattered.
He’s realistic about the causes. Meetings and email aren’t going away, and some of the problem is self-made. Firing off a quick reply is easier than starting the hard thing, so we interrupt ourselves. Christian describes focus as a muscle. It gets stronger when you use it and weakens when you don’t.
For leaders, there’s a second cost. Your team watches how you work. If you’re in meetings all day and answering messages within minutes, they assume that’s what’s expected of them too.
Why Deep Work Feels Hard in the First Ten Minutes
One of the most useful ideas in the book is a plain description of what focus feels like from the inside.
Christian and Eric split a focused work session into three phases. The first five to ten minutes are a fight. Your brain resists and goes looking for something easier. Christian traces that back to our ancestors. If you were tending a fire and a threat came out of the brush, being easily distracted kept you alive. The wiring is still with us.
“The first five to ten minutes are never great,” Christian said.
After that, the resistance drops, and focus becomes noticeably easier for roughly 70 to 80 minutes. Then attention starts to fade. That 90-minute shape follows the ultradian rhythm, the same cycle that moves us through sleep stages at night. During the day, it moves us between alert stretches and shorter dips. When the dip arrives, Christian recommends taking a short break rather than pushing through.
I find this freeing. If the start of a focus block feels terrible, you’re in the part everyone has to get through. Expect it, and give it ten minutes before you decide the session isn’t working.
How to Protect Focus Time When You Don’t Control Your Calendar
When Christian walks executives through this, he says about nine out of ten tell him it’s impossible. These are people with real say over their schedules.
He offers two answers.
The first is to ask. Christian has found that bosses and teammates are more open than people expect to small changes, like starting meetings at 9:30 or 10 instead of first thing. Explain that you want the early part of the day for planning and focused work. Most people are fighting the same problem and will get it.
The second is to look at the edges of the workday. Christian is an early riser, and with two young daughters, he now gets up at 5:30. He doesn’t expect anyone to copy that. His suggestion is smaller. Take 30 minutes before your first meeting to plan the day and start on what matters most. Eric has a line in the book for this: be creative before you’re reactive.
It works best when it fits your natural rhythm. Christian pointed to the research on chronotypes that Daniel Pink covers in When. Early birds think best in the morning and night owls later in the day, and most people land somewhere in between. If you’re a night owl, your protected time may belong at the end of the day instead.
If you lead a team, you’re also the person everyone else needs permission from. A shared rule that meetings start at 9:30, or a focus block the whole team protects, carries more weight when it comes from you than from one person trying to carve out time alone.
Why Sleep Quality Matters More Than Your Sleep Score
Christian slept seven or eight hours a night during his startup years and still woke up drained. He borrows a term the UK’s Sleep Council coined for this: junk sleep. Like junk food, it gives you the volume without the nutrients.
In his simplified version, the nutrients are deep sleep for physical recovery and REM sleep for emotional recovery. He coaches clients toward roughly 60 to 90 minutes of each per night. He isn’t chasing perfection. Good sleep five or six nights a week makes a real difference.
I wear an Oura ring, like a lot of leaders I know. Christian made two points about trackers that changed how I use mine.
First, look past the composite score. His view is that nobody really knows how those scores are calculated. He’s seen people score 75 or 80 on 20 minutes of deep sleep, well short of the range he targets. The raw minutes of deep and REM sleep tell you more.
Second, watch when you check. I look at my data first thing in the morning, and I’m not alone. Christian pointed to a study where people were told they’d slept badly, regardless of how they’d actually slept, and then performed worse. A bad number at six in the morning can set the tone for your whole day. He tries to wait until around lunch and notice how he feels before a device tells him.
Sleep is also only one part of rest. Christian makes the point with a race car.
“If you want to go fast in life, you need great brakes.”
A driver who only uses the accelerator either crashes or has to crawl around the track. The brake, in Christian’s analogy, is the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-digest side that settles you down. If you never use it during the day, it gets rusty, and shifting into rest at night gets harder. Short breaks between focus blocks help keep it working, along with real time off.
How to Reduce Zoom Fatigue on Your Team
The most immediately useful part of our conversation came from someone else’s research. Christian shared three changes drawn from Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson’s work on Zoom fatigue, the exhaustion that builds from hours of video calls. As Christian put it, the point is “better meetings instead of fewer ones.”
Hide self-view. Your camera stays on, and everyone else still sees you. You just stop watching yourself. Christian asked me to imagine someone holding a mirror in front of my face all day. In Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet, you can usually right-click or double-click your own video to turn it off.
Skip full screen. Christian’s explanation goes back to our ancestors again. Seeing a face that close usually meant a fight or intimacy, and the body still reacts as if one were coming. Shrinking the window to about half the screen helps.
Move some calls to audio only. Not every conversation needs video. A one-on-one with a direct report can be a phone call on a walk.
I’ll admit self-view is a trap for me. I catch myself watching my own face instead of the person I’m talking to.
None of these require a policy. They do spread faster when a leader goes first. If you’re the one who suggests the one-on-one walk, your team has a much easier time suggesting it, too.
How Leaders Model Sustainable Productivity
Christian built this method because the hustle version failed him. His co-author learned the same lesson the hard way. Eric had a heart attack on a plane at 36, Christian told me.
The book’s goal is to help you do your best work without sacrificing your health or your relationships. Christian frames it as the 80/20 rule applied to performance. Find the few habits that drive most of the results and get those right.
For a leader, those habits travel. Your team notices when you protect a focus block or leave on time for dinner. They also notice the email that lands at 11 at night.
Christian’s six o’clock dinner came up while his team was scheduling our interview, mentioned as plainly as the time zone. Most of us could treat our own limits that way, and let our people see us do it.
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Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace and the VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR, an outsourced HR and payroll partner for small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon.