Periodisation for Founders, Not Just Athletes

In the nineties, the coaches I trained under believed the athlete who trained ten hours a day would always beat the one who trained six.

They were wrong.

Sports science spent the next thirty years proving it. Periodisation, load management, recovery treated as part of the work rather than a break from it. The athletes got better and the systems got safer at the same time.

Nobody serious argues about it now.

So why does the startup world still run on the model we abandoned?

The founder myth we still fund

I have seen plenty of investors celebrate the founder who lives in the office. Angels, VCs, the lot.

I understand it. I have been that founder for long stretches and I would be lying if I said otherwise. There is something reassuring, if you are writing the cheque, about a person who has visibly given up everything else. It reads as commitment. It is legible in a way that "I stopped at six because hour eleven is worthless" is not.

But the research on cognitive function is not ambiguous. Attention has a shape. It rises, it peaks, it degrades. You cannot hold high quality decision making across fourteen hours and pretend hour twelve looks like hour three.

What I changed

I have been running my own day differently for the past few months. Nothing exotic.

Nonlinear prioritisation. The hardest thinking goes where my brain is actually sharp. Meetings move to protect that window rather than the other way round. Everything else fills the gaps.

That second sentence is the whole intervention. Most calendars are built the opposite way — meetings are placed first because they involve other people, and the difficult solo work gets whatever is left, which is reliably the part of the day where it will go worst. I inverted the ordering, and I defend the window in the way I would defend an athlete's main session.

Everything administrative, reactive or mechanical goes into the trough. It does not need me at my best. It only needs me.

What it produced

Two months in, my output is somewhere between two and two and a half times what it was, on fewer hours.

Not because I found a trick. Because the work is now planned against when I can actually do it.

I should be honest about the quality of that measurement: it is one person, over two months, assessing his own output. I would not accept that as evidence from anybody else, and it is not the reason I am still doing it. The reason is that the difference is not subtle. Work that used to take three attempts across three evenings now takes one morning, and I no longer recognise the version of the day where I ground at something for hours knowing it was not landing.

The rest followed on its own. I track sleep, load and nutrition daily now, the way I would have tracked an athlete I was preparing. If I am asking myself to perform at that level, I should be managed at that level.

It is the same thing I taught badminton coaches for years, applied to a different sport.

Periodisation for an organisation

We are now building this into SportERP, with our new RuNari agent pre-trained on it, for teams that are part human and part agent.

It knows the difference between work that can run at any hour and work that needs a human at their peak, and it sequences the day accordingly. Periodisation for an organisation rather than an athlete.

You might ask why agents need any of this. They run twenty four seven.

They do. Automated work should keep going while you sleep, and if an agent spots an intrusion at three in the morning it should absolutely wake the right person up.

But the orchestrator is human. The high stakes calls still land on someone, and that someone has a peak and a trough like everybody else.

What a team version looks like

Applied to an organisation rather than a person, the same three principles hold.

Load is planned, not discovered. A team that only learns it is overloaded when something slips is running without load management, whatever the sprint board says.

Recovery is scheduled work. In sport, the rest day is in the plan and defended as fiercely as the hard session. In most companies it is what happens when a deadline slips.

Peaks are matched to demands. Not everyone peaks at the same hour, and a fixed nine-to-five treats a real distribution as if it were a constant.

None of that is soft. It is the operational discipline that made athletes both better and safer, and there is no argument I know of for why organisations should be the exception.

The question worth asking

Are we finally ready to train smart, or do we still want founders doing ten hours a day and calling it commitment?

I know which one produced better athletes. Thirty years of sports science settled that argument in one field, and I have yet to hear a reason it should not settle it in another.

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Applying this to a team that is part human and part agent — the sequencing, the accountability, the operating rhythm — is the substance of my product and technology leadership work, and the organisational side sits under business strategy and innovation.