My week is fully booked by Sunday night. Every client commitment, deep work block, and transition buffer is locked in before Monday starts. People say it looks rigid. They are right about the engineering part. I built it because I had to.
I have ADHD. And the system I built for my own brain turned out to be the system my entire company needed.
The meeting problem is not a feeling
It is arithmetic.
Russell Barkley’s work gave me the language: ADHD is a disorder of self-regulation toward time. His prescription is to externalise everything - make plans visible, make time physical. A locked calendar does all three.
The same logic applies to any knowledge worker. A 30-minute meeting that could have been a written update costs far more than 30 minutes. The meeting itself, the recovery time after the interruption, and the fractured context from whatever you were building before it started. Research on interruption and recovery consistently shows a single context switch carries a real recovery cost. Multiply that across a week and the arithmetic gets ugly fast.
Meeting-free days correlate with meaningfully higher output - the pattern is consistent enough that protecting them is not a perk, it is a structural decision.
What protection looks like at our scale
We are eight people across two provinces. We deliver work that competes with firms many times our size. Not because we work more. Because we protect what we have.
Two meeting-free days per week. Sacred. No internal meetings, no status calls, no quick syncs.
No agenda, no meeting. If you can write it, do not schedule it. Friday written updates replaced our status meetings. Nobody misses them.
No back-to-back calls. The brain does not recover between them. We do not do that to our team.
Two open relationship slots per week. Relationships matter. Two is deliberate.
None of this came from a management framework. I built it because without it I cannot function at the level my clients and my team need me to. That framing matters. It means the system is load-bearing, not cosmetic.
I burned out, then watched it happen to someone else
Five years ago, writing mental health days into company policy would have seemed unnecessary to me.
I grew up in pharma. Pushing through was the culture. Tired? Push through. Running on empty and making poor decisions? Nobody talked about that part.
I burned out. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind - where sleep disappears, patience goes, and work you love starts feeling like weight. I did not recognise it while it was happening. That is the dangerous part.
Then I watched the same pattern play out in someone on my team. Same signs I had missed in myself. Same silence around it.
That was the moment I understood: this is not a personal failure. It is a system failure.
Rest is not a reward
At Herbst Group, every one of our eight people matters in a way that is not rhetorical. So we built protection into the structure, not the guidelines.
What we put in writing (POL-ESG-003, Health, Safety and Wellbeing):
- Three paid mental health days per year. No certificate. No justification. You take the day because you need the day.
- Proactive workload monitoring. Consistently working beyond contracted hours triggers a check-in within 48 hours - not a performance review, a conversation.
- If someone has not taken leave for an extended period, we do not congratulate them. We encourage them to stop.
Rest is not a reward. It is a requirement.
I still get it wrong. The ADHD brain wants to do everything at once. I have to remind myself that intensity is not effectiveness - and that the people around me watch how I work, not just what I say.
If I answer emails at midnight, I am telling my team midnight is normal.
Culture is what the leader does when nobody is watching
The policy is signed. But the policy is not the point.
The point is that every person on this team knows they can say “I need a day” and the answer will always be “take it.”
The locked calendar, the meeting-free days, the mental health days, the async-first culture - none of it started as strategy. It started as survival. It turns out that what one person needs to function is often what everyone needs to thrive.
What does your company actually do when someone says they are struggling?
