{"id":637717,"date":"2026-09-27T16:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T16:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/637717\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T16:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T16:28:08","slug":"ex-meta-exec-says-mark-zuckerberg-taught-him-a-lesson-in-work-life-balance-now-he-has-strict-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/637717\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Meta exec says Mark Zuckerberg taught him a lesson in work-life balance. Now he has strict rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Martin Ott joined Facebook to lead its Northern and Central Europe operations as MD in 2012, the company was pre-IPO, pivoting from desktop to mobile phones, and had just a few thousand employees globally.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s one of the few leaders who witnessed Meta\u2019s<\/a> evolution firsthand from its scrappy early days under a twenty-something-year-old Mark Zuckerberg to one of the world\u2019s most powerful platforms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the biggest lesson he took away from that period wasn\u2019t about scale or speed\u2014or grinding all hours of the day<\/a> to make it. Ott credits Zuckerberg with teaching him the opposite: to focus on making the biggest impact you can during working hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things I\u2019m also passing on is, there\u2019s only so many hours in a day,\u201d Ott, who\u2019s now CEO of Taxfix, the Berlin-based tax app valued at more than $1 billion, tells Fortune.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAsk yourself, what is the real one thing you could do today to really have impact, make a difference? Ask yourself, do you need to be in that meeting or not?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tech billionaires say you need to work 24\/7 to make it, but Ott says you\u2019ll just burn out\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a refreshing stance, when so many tech leaders say the only way to make it is by always being on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lucy Guo, the cofounder of Scale AI and the world\u2019s youngest female self-made billionaire, wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and ends her day at midnight. She previously told Fortune people who crave balance are in the wrong job.<\/a><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Twilio\u2019s CEO Khozema Shipchandler<\/a> previously told Fortune the only gap he allows himself \u201cto not think about work is six to eight hours on Saturdays.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Reid Hoffman, the visionary behind LinkedIn, who has said work-life balance simply isn\u2019t possible in the start up world<\/a>\u2014not least for founders. With the exception of dinner with family, he even admitted he expects employees to constantly be working.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat 24\/7 only works so long,\u201d Ott says, while adding switching off is not only important for leaders, but also those working under them. \u201cIt\u2019s also protecting team members from getting burned out. You don\u2019t ever want to get there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is making sure that you\u2019re not about 24\/7 constant on, but being deliberate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Balance and boundaries for emails and meetings<\/p>\n

As well as focusing only on the meetings where he can make a real impact, Ott has built deliberate practices to protect both his own and his team\u2019s boundaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the most important thing is I structure my day,\u201d he said. Ott gets up early most mornings at around 5:30 a.m. and reads for half an hour before working out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI exercise in the mornings, I go running here on the lake,\u201d he says, adding he tries to stay in touch with a support network and meditates for his mental health, too. \u201cAt times, I meditate every day, and then I drop it. Now I\u2019m in the phase where I\u2019ve dropped it and want to pick it up again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even if Ott starts his day early, drafting emails before meetings begin, he\u2019ll make sure they don\u2019t land in his team\u2019s inbox until they start work: \u201cI start writing Slack messages and emails. Often, they only go out with a scheduling function at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. So I don\u2019t pull people out of their free time, which they need to recharge, because it is a marathon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone tells you, when you start a company, or you\u2019re running a company, there will be ups and downs. There will be constant crises. There\u2019s a lot of pressure as well,\u201d Ott adds. \u201cYou need to make sure you see it actually as a marathon, not a sprint. And that also means you have to maintain the high performance over a long period of time. And that doesn\u2019t work 24\/7.\u201d<\/p>\n

A version of this story originally published on\u00a0Fortune.com<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0November 14, 2025.<\/p>\n

Read more career advice from Fortune\u2019s Orianna Rosa Royle:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Martin Ott joined Facebook to lead its Northern and Central Europe operations as MD in 2012, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,17156,2940,13640,106020,61,60,166,2597,410,1226,18416],"class_list":["post-637717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-career-advice","tag-careers","tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","tag-evergreen-refresh","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lifestyle","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-mental-health","tag-meta","tag-work-life-balance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}