The primary function of setting professional boundaries isn't to reject external opportunities. Instead, it's a proactive strategy to protect your time and energy for what you've defined as most important, ensuring you remain present and aligned in your own life.

To maintain performance over the long term, Canva's CEO deliberately creates strict boundaries between work and life. By removing email from her phone, she can be "all in" when working at her laptop and "all out" when she's not, allowing for true mental separation and recovery.

High-achievers often burn out by over-investing emotionally, driven by an intense internal definition of success. To break this cycle, get external input from stakeholders. Their definition of "good enough" is often more reasonable and can help you recalibrate your own success metrics and boundaries.

Founders often equate constant hustle with progress, saying yes to every opportunity. This leads to burnout. The critical mindset shift is recognizing that every professional "yes" is an implicit "no" to personal life. True success can mean choosing less income to regain time, a decision that can change a business's trajectory.

Coterie maintains its premium brand status by systematically rejecting initiatives that don't meet an extremely high bar. If a new product isn't 'demonstratively better' or in direct service to the customer, the company kills the project, protecting its brand and focus.

While context switching is a PM's tool, it becomes destructive without focus. A leader's job is to protect their team by setting crystal-clear goals and outcomes. This allows product managers to context-switch *productively* within a defined scope, not be pulled in unrelated directions.

Your worth isn't measured by how much you can handle before you break. Instead of using your calendar to prove your capacity for work, use it to intentionally protect your peace. Radical prioritization and scheduling open space is a strategic move that enables better decision-making.

Burnout often stems from accumulating commitments that are no longer aligned with your goals. Actively create a "to-don't" list by auditing your calendar for tasks and meetings that don't serve your current vision, and then systematically eliminate them.

At scale, the biggest threat isn't a lack of opportunity but mental overload. The key is to treat your focus as a finite resource and actively protect it. This means becoming comfortable saying "I'm done for today" and disappointing people, realizing that protecting your mind is more strategic than satisfying every request.