How to manage your work-life balance?

Discover why traditional work-life balance advice fails founders and what successful CEE entrepreneurs do instead. Based on insights from Dawid Adach (MDBootstrap, CogniVis.ai), learn the three-domain integration model, understand when to step back vs. step in, and plan your long-term founder journey strategically.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Founder Hours

Dawid Adach laughs when asked about work-life balance. "I smile because you just made me realize that I quit my 9:00 to 5:00 job to work 9:00 to 11:00 PM—which is the startup life."

This confession reveals something most founder advice gets wrong. We're told to "balance" work and life as if they're separate buckets you fill equally. But successful founders don't balance—they integrate. And the data backs this up in surprising ways.

Why Even Billionaire CEOs Work 120-Hour Weeks

Here's what should change your perspective: "Tim Cook, Elon Musk, the CEO of NVIDIA—they all say openly that they work from 60 to 120 hours a week." These aren't struggling startups. These are the richest companies in the world.

Why would billionaire CEOs choose this schedule? "Companies will always need this founder or CEO energy. It doesn't necessarily have to be founder, but this CEO energy, because this is the role of the CEO."

The energy economics are simple: if you want above-average results, you need above-average effort. "When you start from scratch, you are way behind the existing competitors. So you have to work harder to first get to the average level, and then to exceed it."

The Three-Domain Integration Model

Traditional work-life balance assumes independence. Adach discovered the opposite through building MDBootstrap: "I think those three areas—business, personal, and family/friends—they intersect. If one doesn't work for you, probably the entire picture doesn't work either."

This creates a counterintuitive dynamic. "If my business isn't going well, it's impossible for me to enjoy my personal time or even family time. This is all connected."

Rather than draining your life, a thriving business energizes everything else. The reverse is equally true—neglecting health or relationships eventually undermines business performance.

The Adaptive Leadership Cycle

The integration model doesn't mean permanent 120-hour weeks. Successful founders cycle through phases based on business needs and market conditions.

Adach's MDBootstrap journey illustrates this perfectly: "We had a time when we were very heavily involved in our company, and then we managed to grow to the level and scale when we had a team to run the company for us, and we could step out to more of a board of directors role."

This worked for "two, three years when the company was on autopilot from my perspective." But market disruption changed everything: "Then AI came into the picture, and it changed everything. We had to step back because AI definitely affects our market, our industry."

The lesson: successful founders adapt their involvement based on business lifecycle and external threats, not arbitrary work-life balance rules.

The Role Clarity Decision

This reality forces a critical question about your founder journey. "Everyone should ask himself: do you really want to be in that role? Because if you're going for the money, maybe you just need to set up a company and sell it, or hire the CEO and move to a stakeholder position."

Three viable paths emerge:

The Operator Path: Stay involved as CEO, accepting energy demands for direct control and impact

The Builder-Exit Path: Build, scale, and sell companies systematically

The Stakeholder Path: Build initial traction, hire operational leadership, maintain board involvement

Each path requires different integration strategies. Operators must optimize for sustainable high performance. Builder-exits can sprint intensely for shorter periods. Stakeholders need systems that work without constant founder energy.

The Bottom Line

Work-life balance is the wrong framework for founders. The three domains of business, personal, and family life interconnect—when one thrives, it energizes the others.

The transcript

Paweł Michalski (CEO at VCLeaders): Quitting your corporate life allowed you and your business partner to not work the 9:00 to 5:00 anymore, but how did it affect your work-life balance? You've touched on the coziness of the corporate life. So I wonder how do you look at the flexibility of the entrepreneurial life now?

Dawid Adach: I smile because you just made me realize that I quit my 9:00 to 5:00 job to work 9:00 to 11:00 PM—which is the startup life.

Work-life balance is tricky, and I think this is very important, especially these days, because there's a lot of discussion about people bragging about how much they work. Well, to be honest, I think that if you want to have results—regardless whether you're in corporate or your own company—you have to do more than average. Otherwise, if you want average results, average work is enough for that.

But let's be honest: when you start from scratch, you are way behind the existing competitors. So you have to work harder to first get to the average level, and then to exceed it. So I don't see other options. At least I don't know anyone who found the magic wand which would help him to magically go from zero to exceptional.

The second thing is, if you look at guys like Tim Cook, Elon Musk, or the CEO of NVIDIA, they all say openly that they work from 60 to 120 hours a week. And you could ask, "Why?" Those guys are CEOs of the richest companies in the world, so they don't have to. But they still do it, which shows me that companies will always need this founder or CEO energy. It doesn't necessarily have to be founder, but this CEO energy, because this is the role of the CEO.

So probably this is the question everyone should ask himself: do you really want to be in that role? Because if you're going for the money, maybe you just need to set up a company and sell it, or hire the CEO and move to a stakeholder position on the board.

I experienced all of that. With MDBootstrap, we built it at the very beginning. For a couple of years, we were working very hard, so the work-life balance was very difficult to keep.

On the other hand, I think that those three areas—business, personal, and family/friends—they intersect. If one doesn't work for you, probably the entire picture doesn't work either. At least for me, if my business isn't going well, it's impossible for me to enjoy my personal time or even family time. To me, it's all connected.

So I think this is why work-life balance is important, because you cannot grow your company if other areas are not taken care of.

Coming back to what I was saying before: we had a time when we were very heavily involved in our company, and then we managed to grow to the level and scale when we had a team to run the company for us, and we could actually step out to more of a board of directors role or stakeholders. So we also had two, three years when the company was on autopilot from my perspective.

But then AI came into the picture, and it changed everything. So now we have to step back because AI definitely affects our market, our industry. We know that if we're not going to do anything about that, probably the company will be gone in the next two years. So we had to step back and reinvent the company. That's how we came up with the new company, which is doing AI actually.