Fatigue Arrives As Certainty, Which Is Why It Is Missed

The characteristic sign of a depleted chief executive is not indecision but unusual conviction.

Sustained decision making under uncertainty is tiring in a way that long hours alone are not, and the tiredness rarely announces itself as tiredness. It shows up as impatience with detail, as reaching for the option that ends the discussion, as a marked drop in the number of questions you ask, and as an unfamiliar confidence about matters you would previously have wanted to test. People around you experience this as decisiveness and may even welcome it, which is why it can run for months before anyone, including you, identifies it.

Some of the defences are structural and worth building while you are fresh. Reduce the number of decisions that reach you, which is the same discipline as clarifying decision rights. Batch the routine ones rather than scattering them through the day. Put the consequential ones early, before the day has spent you, and impose a standing rule that anything irreversible waits overnight unless there is a genuine reason it cannot. None of this is a productivity flourish. It is simply arranging matters so that your worst hours are spent on your smallest questions.

The rest is a matter of noticing, and of having people around you who are permitted to say that you do not seem yourself. Sustained pressure and isolation take a real toll, and treating that as a private weakness to be managed alone is both common and unwise. If it is persistent, professional support is the appropriate route, and seeking it is an ordinary act of judgement rather than an admission of unsuitability. The organisation has one chief executive, and its interest in that person remaining functional is direct.