The Word My Sister Used to Describe Me
What an 8-Year-Old Taught Me About Running on Empty
When my little sister was 8, I asked her to describe everyone in our family in one word. Her brother was annoying. Our older brother was fun. Then she got to me, made the face she makes when she's thinking hard, and landed on: "Stressed."
She wasn't wrong. She'd known me her whole life as someone working 50-plus hours a week. The year she was born was the same year I had my first anxiety attack — and I'd been managing it, more or less, ever since, somewhere between the restaurant floor and night classes.
A couple years before that conversation, I went through a personal development program that asked me to write my own eulogy. Not a fun exercise. I thought about the people closest to me and what they'd actually say if they were being honest. What I landed on was this: the through-line of my legacy, at that point, was stress. Not leadership. Not impact. Stress.
That's the moment margin stopped being a nice idea and became something I had to actually build.
Here's what I mean by margin: space. Space to breathe, space to think, space to actually see a problem clearly enough to solve it — instead of reacting to it from inside the fog. And brain fog is the operative phrase. We don't make good decisions without margin. Not eventually. Not ever. I've watched two executives at the company I worked for get hospitalized for mental breakdowns. I've heard the same story from leader after leader: staffing is thin, the day is full, and the goals keep slipping — not because the goals were wrong, but because there was no room left to actually think about them.
So if margin is the thing that's missing, the fix isn't "try harder." It's "make room." Here's where I started:
1. I simplified my tech stack.
stopped keeping notes in four different apps and a stack of Post-its on my desk. Every note went in one place. Every task went in one place. Everything — the coaching call, the doctor's appointment, a client deadline — went on a single calendar. And I made a rule: the inbox gets cleared to zero, on purpose, every day. It was never about being tidy. I didn't care about tidy. I cared about not spending the one resource I didn't have enough of — attention — re-finding information I already had five minutes earlier.
2. I delegated and deferred.
Then I looked at how many decisions I was making before I even got to work — what to wear, what to eat, whether to answer that text now or later. Dozens of tiny decisions, all before 9 a.m., all pulling from the same tank. So I started eliminating the ones I didn't need to make fresh every day. I automated what I could. I planned ahead everything else. Because I'd finally noticed: every small decision I made before 9 a.m. was attention I didn't have left for the decision that actually mattered at 9:01.
3. I built a morning routine.
This was the one I resisted longest, because it looked like it would cost me time I didn't have. I gave the first hour more room than felt efficient — coffee, quiet, a few pages of something worth reading, before the day got its hands on me. It felt like wasted time at first. It wasn't. It was the margin the rest of my day borrowed against, and without it, everything after 8 a.m. cost more than it should have.
What we do at home walks into work with us. If your morning is thirty small decisions made half-awake, you show up to the first real decision of the day already spent. Eliminating the small stuff isn't about optimizing your life. It's about having something left in the tank when it counts.
I don't know what your one word would be if someone who loves you had to pick one. But if it's anything like mine was, the fix isn't working harder or caring more. It's making room — on your calendar, in your head, before you even get to work — so you can actually think clearly enough to lead well.
What's the one decision you could take off your plate this week, just to get a little more room to breathe?
