What could you do differently?

At 4:36 p.m., a Teams notification broke the calm.

“The task only takes three hours,” it said.

“You still have some slack, right?”

Slack looks like empty space on someone else’s calendar.

What they don’t see are the trades behind it—

asking others to cover,

pulling support just to protect a few hours of focus.

Those three hours aren’t just three hours.

They cost context, momentum, and people.

I still said yes.

That’s the part I could do differently.

Next time, instead of silently absorbing the cost,

I could make the trade visible—

not to resist the work,

but to remind us both that “slack” is rarely free.