They feel identical from the inside and they lead to completely different decisions. One is fixed by two weeks away and a different set of responsibilities. The other is fixed by handing the company to someone else.
We buy companies, so the obvious thing for us to do here is tell you that you're done. We're not going to. Most founders who feel this way are tired, and selling a company you'd have loved again in six months is a decision you can't take back.
You dread the calendar, not the company.
A good week still feels good.
You can name three specific things you'd change tomorrow if you had the time.
The idea of a new hire taking half your job sounds like relief.
You've been saying you'll take a proper holiday for two years.
Tired is a workload and a responsibilities problem. It responds to time off, to hiring, to giving away the parts of the job you've outgrown, and to a fortnight where nobody can reach you.
A good quarter changes nothing about how you feel.
You've stopped having opinions about the roadmap.
You catch yourself hoping someone will make the decision for you.
You can't picture yourself here in three years, and haven't been able to for a while.
You've quietly started calculating what a sale would leave you.
Done is a direction problem. It survives holidays, new hires and good quarters, and it doesn't get better by trying harder. If this is the column you recognize, the company deserves an owner who wants the next five years.
All of these are cheaper and more reversible than a sale. If you've genuinely tried them and nothing shifted, that's real information rather than a failure.
Not a holiday with the laptop. No Slack, no email, one named person who can call you if the building burns down. Most founders have never done this, and it is the cheapest diagnostic available.
Usually sales or support. It costs less than you think against what you're currently spending in attention, and it changes the texture of the week more than anything else on this list.
Run the company at the size it is. Founders who deliberately stop pushing frequently discover the exhaustion came from the pushing, not from the company.
You can step out of the operating role without selling. It's harder than it sounds and it works, and it keeps the asset while removing the job.
Not a sale. A conversation. Knowing the number removes a background anxiety and makes the decision concrete instead of theoretical, and you can stop at any point.
Not until you've distinguished tired from done. Take two genuinely unreachable weeks first. If you come back and the feeling is unchanged, that's real, and a company run by someone who has mentally left is worse for everyone than a clean handover.
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