When Martin Ott joined Facebook to lead its Northern and Central European operations as managing director in 2012, the company was still pre-IPO, transitioning from desktop to smartphones, and had just a few thousand employees worldwide.
He is one of the few leaders who has witnessed Meta’s evolution up close—from its impromptu early days under the command of a twenty-something Mark Zuckerberg to becoming one of the most powerful platforms in the world.
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But the biggest lesson he took away from this period wasn’t about scale, speed — or working non-stop. Ott credits Zuckerberg with learning the opposite: focusing on making the biggest impact possible during work hours.
“One of the things I’m also getting across is: there are only ‘x’ hours in the day,” says Ott, now CEO of Taxfix, a Berlin-based income tax app valued at more than $1 billion, in an interview with Fortune.
“Ask yourself: What’s the one thing you could do today to really make an impact, to make a difference? Ask yourself: Do you really need to be in that meeting or not?”
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Tech billionaires say you need to work 24/7, but Ott says that only leads to burnout
It’s a refreshing insight, especially when so many technology leaders say the only way to get there is to always be available.
Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI and the youngest woman in the world to become a self-made billionaire, wakes up at 5:30 am and ends her day at midnight. She previously told Fortune that people who seek balance are in the wrong job.
Meanwhile, Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler told Fortune that the only time he allows himself not to think about work is between six and eight hours on Saturdays.
And then there’s Reid Hoffman, the visionary behind LinkedIn, who has said that work-life balance simply isn’t possible in the startup world — especially for founders. With the exception of family dinner, he even admitted that he expects employees to always be working.
“This 24/7 rhythm only works for so long,” says Ott, adding that switching off is important not only for leaders, but also for those who work under them. “It’s also about protecting team members from burnout. You never want to get to that point.”
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“It’s about making sure you’re not on all the time, but rather acting deliberately.”
Balance and limits for emails and meetings
In addition to focusing only on meetings where he can truly make an impact, Ott has created deliberate practices to protect his own boundaries and those of his team.
“So the most important thing is that I structure my day.” Ott wakes up early most mornings, around 5:30 a.m., and reads for half an hour before exercising.
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“I exercise in the morning, I run here at the lake,” he says, adding that he tries to stay in touch with a support network and also meditates to maintain his mental health. “Sometimes, I meditate every day, and then I abandon it. Now I’m at the stage where I stopped doing it and want to start again.”
But even though he starts his day early and writes emails before meetings, he makes sure they don’t reach the team until the workday starts: “I start writing Slack messages and emails. They often don’t go out with a scheduling function until 8am or 9am. That way, I don’t take away from people their free time, which they need to recharge — because it’s a marathon.”
“Everyone tells you: When you start or run a company, there will be ups and downs. There will be constant crises. There’s a lot of pressure, too,” adds Ott. “You need to look at this as a marathon, not a sprint. And that also means maintaining high performance for a long period of time. And that doesn’t work 24/7.”
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