The CEO Who Left Office at 5:30 PM every day.

On the discipline of designing your own absence — even if you are not the CEO

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for Rediff on Aditya Puri — the banker who built HDFC Bank to function without him. Several of you who read it wrote back with the same question, in different words. The CEO’s discipline is admirable. But what does it mean for the rest of us, the ones who do not run banks, who cannot leave at 5:30 PM who do not have a Lonavala farmhouse waiting at the weekend?

This edition is for you.

First, a small recap. The 2009 Business Standard interview with Puri — headlined A Lifelong Pursuit of Leisure — is one of the most quietly radical interviews I have read with an Indian CEO. Puri described, with no embarrassment, a working life that bore almost no resemblance to what most of us would recognise. He carried no mobile phone. He carried no laptop. He left the office at 5:30 pm sharp. He did not work on weekends. He told the journalists his management mantra came from a cartoon: one half showed the boss buried in work while everyone else relaxed; the other half showed the boss napping while everyone else was glued to their computers. I am sure you know which half is my favourite, he said.

What I want to do here is take this seriously not as a CEO story but as a piece of design thinking, and ask what it offers to a senior or middle manager who is reading this.

The first chapter of my book Lead Less, Build More is titled The Art of Doing Nothing. I open it at 2 am in a Frankfurt hotel room, where I am spending forty minutes drafting a response to a three-sentence email because my brain has become too scattered to handle anything simpler. The chapter argues that the leaders who think most clearly are not the ones who work the most hours — they are the ones who have built genuine pause into the structure of their week. The neuroscience supports this. The Default Mode Network, the part of the brain that produces our deepest insights, only switches on when we stop executing. As long as you are answering emails, sitting in meetings, or reacting to the next thing on the screen, you are suppressing the very system that generates your most important thinking.

Now — and this is the part that matters for the rest of us — the question is how a manager who is not a CEO does the equivalent.

The instinct is to say it cannot be done. You have a boss. You have clients. You have deliverables. You cannot simply walk out at 5:30. You cannot make yourself unreachable on weekends. The structure of your work does not allow for it.

I want to push back on that, gently.

The thing Puri did was not exotic. It was structural. He decided, in advance, what was non-negotiable. Then he treated those non-negotiables as load-bearing walls of his week, the way you would treat a board meeting or a client commitment. Most of us treat our pause time as something that happens if everything else goes well. He treated his work time as something that happened around his pause. The order is reversed, and the reversal is the entire point.

Here is what this looks like in practice for someone who is not at the top of the organisation chart.

The first move is to identify one block of time each week that is genuinely yours. Not for catching up on email. Not for the work you did not finish on Friday. A block of time — it can be ninety minutes, it can be a Saturday morning, it can be the first hour of your Tuesday — in which you are not consuming inputs and not producing outputs. You are simply thinking. The discipline is to put it on the calendar, treat it as immovable, and refuse to let it become the first thing that gets sacrificed when the week gets busy. If you do this for six weeks consistently, you will start noticing that your strategic thinking has visibly sharpened. If you do it for six months, you will not recognise the version of yourself who used to operate without it.

The second move is to identify your own equivalent of the mobile phone Puri did not carry. For most of us the mobile is non-negotiable. But the always-on email habit is not. The Slack-or-Teams-on-evenings habit is not. The reflex of replying to a non-urgent message at 11 pm because you happened to see it is not. People will calibrate their expectations to whatever you reveal. If you reply at 11 pm, you have taught them to send things at 11 pm. If you reply on Monday morning, they will adapt within a fortnight.

The third move is the hardest, and it is where most senior managers fail. It is to be unembarrassed about it. Puri’s power in that 2009 interview was not just that he had a 5:30 PM departure — it was that he was openly cheerful about it. He did not apologise. He did not frame it as work-life balance. He treated it as the obvious correct way to run a CEO’s week, and the journalists, having no rebuttal, simply printed what he said. Most of us, when we take a pause, immediately undermine it by signalling guilt about it. We send the apologetic message before we leave. We come back overcompensating. We make the pause smaller than it needs to be because we are not yet convinced we are entitled to it.

You are entitled to it. Not because you have earned it. Because without it, you cannot do the work you are paid to do.

This is the architectural shift my book argues for, and it is the shift Puri’s career embodies. Pause is not the reward for finishing the work. Pause is the infrastructure that makes the work possible. A senior leader who treats pause as a luxury they will get to once the urgent things are handled will never get to it, because the urgent things never end. The leaders who get to it are the ones who reverse the polarity — who treat pause as the structural beam and let the urgent things organise themselves around it.

There is one more thing worth saying. People sometimes hear this argument and assume it is about working less. It is not. Puri did not work less — he worked differently. He made his available hours intensely productive precisely because the unavailable hours were genuinely unavailable. The 5:30 cut-off did not produce a worse banker. It produced a banker who, when he was at his desk, was fully present.

The thing most of us are doing instead is leaking. We are at our desks for twelve hours but mentally available for none of them. We answer emails through dinner but absorb nothing of what is actually said at the table. We bring the unfinished thread of Tuesday’s problem into Wednesday’s meeting and wonder why our contribution feels muddled. The Default Mode Network never gets to switch on, so the pattern-recognition that would have unlocked Tuesday’s problem never happens — and the cycle deepens.

Puri’s answer to this was simple. He stopped leaking. He drew lines around his time and held them. The lines were not where most of us would have drawn them, but the principle is portable. Wherever you draw your lines, hold them. Let the system that organises around you adjust. It will, faster than you expect.

The question I want to leave you with is not whether you can copy Puri’s calendar. You probably cannot. The question is whether there is one line you have been meaning to draw — one block of pause, one device-free evening, one Saturday morning that belongs to your own thinking — that you have been postponing because the urgent has crowded it out.

Draw it this week. Not next week.

That is what doing nothing looks like, in practice.

It is what it is.