You already run a team, a division or a business. Your calendar fills before the week begins, and you are in charge of responsibilities that cannot simply be handed over to someone else. Adding doctoral research to that load can sound like a step too far.
You might wonder how people at your level actually do it. The answer is not to find more hours in the day. You probably do not have any.
Instead, you need to make your DBA (Doctor of Business Administration) work around the realities of your professional life. That means planning your time differently, choosing your priorities carefully and finding ways to connect your academic work with the business challenges you already understand. The balance is demanding, but it can be practical with the right structure.
Here are some potential roadblocks and practical solutions to balance an online DBA with a demanding career.
Senior leaders rarely struggle with discipline. They struggle with interruption. A program that competes with your working week will lose, so the delivery format matters more than most people expect.
The solution: Choose a DBA for working professionals that is built around your schedule. SP Jain Global's online DBA is taught on the weekends, so your weekdays stay with your board, your team and your clients. Because classes are online, you can join from wherever work has taken you that week, including a hotel room between meetings.
Senior leadership often comes with an expectation of constant availability. Your team needs a decision. A client calls. A board meeting runs over. Someone needs your input before the end of the day. If every interruption takes priority, your research will always be pushed to the bottom of the list.
A DBA is built on sustained thinking, and sustained thinking does not survive in the gaps between meetings. Without protected time, reading and writing slip to the bottom of the list.
The solution: Treat your research hours like a board commitment. Two or three fixed blocks each week usually work better than scattered evenings. While working early mornings suits some people, a long Sunday block suits others. Brief your assistant or team, then defend those hours.
Let your reading work for you, too. Papers on strategy, governance or consumer behaviour often bear directly on decisions sitting on your desk. When study and work overlap, the hours feel less like a cost.
The DBA experience of Dr Rakesh Setia, CEO at Runwal Enterprises, offers an interesting example. While managing his professional responsibilities, he initially attended online weekend classes. Later, when he reached a stage of his research that required greater concentration, he spent an intensive period at the Singapore campus. He described his routine during that period simply: "I used to reach campus every day at 8 AM and would leave only by 10 PM."
The lesson is not that you need to study for 14 hours a day. Instead, different stages of a DBA may require different approaches to managing your time.
You may be used to being the person others turn to when something needs to get done. That mindset can make balancing an online DBA unnecessarily difficult. You have a team at work, but you may also need support outside of work.
Solution: Build a support system before you need it. Talk to your employer about your plans. Depending on your role and organisation, you may be able to arrange some flexibility around particularly demanding research periods.
Your family also needs to know what the commitment will look like. If Saturday mornings become your regular research time, it helps when the people around you understand why.
Your academic support network matters too. Supervisors, faculty, and fellow DBA candidates can offer perspective when a research problem becomes difficult.
Your employer may support your decision to study, but that does not always mean they see how it connects to your role.
If your DBA feels like something you do outside work, every hour spent reading, researching or writing can look like an hour taken away from the business. Over time, that can make it harder to get the flexibility and support you need.
The solution: Choose a research question your organisation needs answered. The study and the role then feed each other. Try asking: what problem in your organisation would you most like to solve rigorously? This can lead you towards a research topic that has value beyond your thesis.
It also changes the conversation with your employer. You are no longer asking the organisation to support a personal academic pursuit that happens outside your working hours. You are developing deeper expertise around a problem that the business itself needs to understand.
That can create a useful cycle. Your role gives you access to real business questions and context. Your DBA gives you the time and framework to investigate those questions more deeply. Your findings can then bring a new perspective back to the organisation.
Careers do not pause for degrees. You create a plan at the beginning of the DBA and expect everything to follow it. Then, a restructure, a merger or a global event can capture your attention for months. Your original schedule no longer works. Many senior professionals hesitate to start because they fear they will not be able to finish.
The solution: Plan for a pause, and choose a program where the faculty relationship is supported through it. Ask admissions how supervisors handle breaks, and how many students have resumed after one.
Dr Rakesh Setia's experience is again a good example. He began his DBA in 2018 but later took a break because of professional and personal commitments during the COVID-19 pandemic. He eventually returned to his research and completed his thesis.
His experience is reassuring for senior professionals because it shows that progress does not always have to be linear. A temporary pause does not have to mean giving up. The important thing is knowing when to adjust your approach and having a plan for getting back into your academic routine.
You are used to absorbing pressure. You carry decisions, people, and targets every day. A DBA adds years of demanding intellectual work on top of that. Most people plan their hours carefully but forget to plan their energy. The result is fatigue that builds quietly, then shows up in your work, your research and your home life.
The solution: Treat rest as part of the plan, not a reward for finishing it. Build recovery into your calendar the way you build in research time.
Keep one half-day each week free from both work and study. Schedule short breaks between research blocks. Protect your sleep, because writing and analysis are the first things to suffer without it. Hold on to the habits you already have, such as exercise or time outdoors. They are the easiest to drop under pressure and the hardest to rebuild.
Dr Sanchari Sinha’s DBA journey offers a practical example of how to manage these competing demands. Her biggest challenge was balancing a leadership role, a new and demanding job and her personal commitments, all at once. What worked for her was structure: a planned schedule, a simple checklist and steady milestones that she adjusted as life changed. She also kept her goal close by picturing the “Dr” title before her name every day.
If the pressure stays high, speak to your supervisor or program team early. Stepping back for a period is a sensible response to a demanding season. It is not a failure.
An online DBA will add another responsibility to your life. There is no getting around that. But for a senior professional, the right question is not simply how you will find time to study. It is whether the experience can be meaningful enough to justify the commitment: whether it can shape how your organisation works and bring about real change in large enterprises and even entire industries.
What matters is that your DBA does not become a second job competing with your first. Done thoughtfully, it can become part of the same professional path, giving you the opportunity to go deeper into the questions that have shaped your career and develop a more rigorous way of thinking about the decisions that come next. You are not stepping away from your career to study. You are taking on a challenge that turns your experience into research capable of influencing how organisations and industries move forward.
Career opportunities after an online DBA
DBA vs Executive MBA for senior leaders
Maritime operations to business transformation: Dr Bireshwar Kumar’s DBA journey