Sign the payroll. Return the banker’s call. Chase down Friday’s missing shipment. Referee two managers, both dead certain they’re right. Walk the floor, check the numbers, answer the question someone’s been waiting on since Monday.

As a business owner, you’re running on fumes by 5pm, exhausted from just maintaining the day-to-day.

Then someone leans in with a book, a podcast, a friend who means well and says: “You need to work on your business, not just in it.”

“Great,” you might say.

“I know that. But with what time? What energy? I can barely clear the inbox, and now I’m supposed to retreat to a mountaintop and think big thoughts about strategy?”

To most leaders “work on the business” is sound advice in theory, but hopelessly naive in reality. Telling you to do it doesn’t help, it just adds shame when you’re already stretched thin from a 60 hour week of putting out fires.

What you need are answers to the follow up questions:

What does working on the business actually look like? What would you actually do? And just what might change in your company as a result?

Here’s what I recommend:

1. Protect One Hour

Most notions of working on the business are heavily idealized. A rustic cabin in the woods. A week-long retreat. The good coffee and a whiteboard covered in tasteful arrows.

I love those sessions. I’m a big advocate of them. I coach teams through them on a regular basis. But the reality is that they’re rare. The perfect setting only comes up once a year, once a quarter if you’re lucky. And any CEO knows how many problems pile up in the meantime.

So you can’t wait for the retreat.

Instead, I recommend leaders protect one hour every single week.

Block it out on your calendar. Mute your notifications. Hunker down somewhere you can focus for sixty minutes.

Now considering all the challenges you face, I know sixty minutes might feel hopelessly short. After all, you’ve got:

• Sales and marketing locked in a months-long feud
• A few accounts carrying too much of your revenue
• Turnover creeping up and a culture that started drifting sometime in the last six years

One hour for all that? Of course not. That’s the whole point.

2. Pick One Recurring Issue

Before each session, pick one issue. A single, definable, manageable issue. (No solving the American economy or retooling your entire go-to-market strategy here.)

Zero in on the one challenge you want solved or the one question you want answered.

That doesn’t mean other issues aren’t important or don’t deserve dedicated time—that’s why this is a weekly habit. But try to solve everything and you’ll solve nothing. By staying focused on one issue at a time you’ll make actual headway on something that’s affecting your business.

How do you choose which issue to focus on?

There are all kinds of prioritization strategies. You might even spend your first working-on-the-business-session outlining and ranking issues for future sessions.

As a general rule, I recommend you look for the challenges that recurs the most. If something has been a problem repeatedly, it will likely continue to be a problem. And usually a recurring problem is a signal that there’s a deeper issue underneath.

3. Decide What You Need to Produce

Before you sit down, decide what the hour needs to produce.

Maybe it’s a set of questions for the sales team. A shortlist of roles you’d want to hire next. Documented math on where the largest shares of your revenue come from.

Working on the business needs a clear goal and a defined deliverable. That’s the best way to keep your time focused and effective.

Notice that the goal here isn’t to solve an issue from the ground up in one session. For most issues leaders face, that’s just not realistic. Instead, chunk up big challenges into smaller goals and deliverables. Then work on these over a series of sessions. It might feel incomplete at first, but remember that steady, incremental progress beats sustained heroic efforts every time.

Here’s What Actually Changes

Protect your one hour of focused time most weeks, and you’ll spend roughly 50 hours working on your business over the year. That’s about six full workdays, spread across the calendar instead of saved for one retreat.

Imagine the difference that could make.

The big issues stop waiting for the annual meeting. The smaller ones get solved before they become big ones. And the progress compounds without requiring you to drop all the day-to-day responsibilities of being a leader.

So block out your hour. Pick your issue. And define what done looks like for today. It’s the best way to be a strategic leader in the midst of the busyness.