You know what never makes it into the project plan? The living. The actual life stuff. Nobody books a Teams invite for “call the doctor back before 3pm” or “sit quietly for five minutes so your brain doesn’t leak out your ears.”
And yet those moments are the real scaffolding holding the rest of the week together.
In between the dashboards and the flight itineraries, the office drama and the inbox roulette, we’re out here managing:
-A prescription that runs out the same week as your business trip.
-A family member with no boundaries, or respect for your work hours.
-A loved one labeled “at risk for sudden death.”
And still the work drum keeps beating, relentlessly: deliver, pivot, present.
But sanity doesn’t come from pretending life isn’t barging in. It comes from quietly upgrading our own operating system:
-Building skills for the curveballs.
-Leaning on our network for backup.
-Choosing activities that actually move the needle.
-Refreshing knowledge so we’re not flying blind.
Those aren’t “extras,” they’re tools.
So if your camera’s off for the meeting, or your Teams reply shows up hours later than usual, it’s not a failure. It’s the cost of being human in a system that still expects robots.
Because between the meetings is where life happens; and sometimes survival looks less like a strategy deck, and more like how gracefully you juggle grief, prescriptions, and Teams notifications without throwing your laptop out the window.
