The Hardest Part of Leadership No One Warns You About
Leadership gets overwhelming when you're juggling people, priorities, and your own tasks. Here’s how to stay productive and grounded without burning out.
There’s a kind of overwhelm that hits differently when you move from just doing the work to leading others who do the work.
Suddenly, your days aren’t just filled with your own tasks; they’re filled with check-ins, approvals, feedback loops, and messages that all start with “quick question.”
When I think about the seasons in my career where I’ve felt the most stretched, it’s always been during those transitions — managing people, collaborating across functions, and trying to maintain my own output in the middle of it all.
And here’s the thing about leadership that nobody tells you: accessibility isn’t optional. Your team needs you responsive, present, and available. But if you’re always available to everyone else, when do you actually get your own work done?
Leadership doesn’t have to mean constant chaos. Over time, I’ve found a few habits that help me stay grounded and focused, even when my calendar looks like an obstacle course.
1. Write Everything Down (Seriously, Everything)
I know everyone says to make to-do lists. But hear me out on why this matters so much when you’re leading.
When you’re constantly switching between tasks or meetings with different teams, your brain is doing expensive cognitive work just to reload context each time. That mental switching cost slows you down more than you realize.
My solution is to write down every single task, commitment, and thought that needs action. But the key isn’t just capturing it, it’s having a system that helps you auto-schedule and auto-prioritize (I use rivva for this).
This means that in those precious 15-minute gaps between meetings, you don’t waste time figuring out what to do. You look at your system and immediately know: this is what matters right now. No decision fatigue, just execution.
For my system in rivva, I send my messy notes to my AI assistant and it gets turned into clearly-defined tasks scheduled for my next peak performance period.
2. Treat your calendar like a personal operating system
Most people treat their calendar as a place where they just set or view meetings. I’ve learned to treat mine as the orchestration tool for my entire day.
I don’t just look at when I have meetings, I actively design my day:
Block deep work time before others can claim it
Align tasks with my energy levels (e.g. critical work in the morning, admin & meetings in the afternoon)
Set my status intentionally to signal when I’m available and when I’m not
Move things around dynamically when priorities shift or I get stuck
When a task takes longer than expected or something urgent comes up, I don’t just push through or let it derail me. I rearrange my calendar to maintain flow throughout the day. This flexibility within structure has been game-changing.
3. Over-Communicate (Without Overcommitting)
Leadership comes with an unspoken pressure to always be responsive. Your team needs to feel supported, not neglected. But if you respond to every message immediately, you’ll never accomplish your own priorities.
The answer isn’t choosing between being responsive or being productive. It’s over-communicating your timeline and process.
Simple messages like:
“Got this, I’ll come back to you in a few hours”
“I’ll reply to this properly tomorrow”
“I don’t have bandwidth right now, but drop it in the project channel with my tag and I’ll review it later”
“I’m in deep work this morning, but I’ll be free from 2pm”
These quick acknowledgments do something powerful: they let people know they’re not being ignored while protecting your ability to focus. You’re not leaving people hanging, but you’re also not letting constant interruptions prevent you from doing your own meaningful work.
Conclusion
None of these strategies are revolutionary on their own. But together, they create a system that lets you be both an accessible leader and an effective individual contributor.
You can’t just rely on willpower or working longer hours. You need structures that actively support both roles; structures that capture everything, orchestrate your time intentionally, and keep communication flowing without demanding your constant attention.
rivva is the AI productivity assistant that helps unifies all your work context with your energy context, so you can get work done during your peak performance times without neglecting other priorities or getting burnt out.