We keep saying to clients that you need to protect your non-negotiables, especially when a deadline is bearing down on you. It’s one of the most common patterns we see, and it shows up particularly often in PhD students. A deadline comes up, everything gets thrown at it, and the rest of life quietly drops away. Friends stop getting seen. The gym plan disappears. The music goes too.
The problem is that those weren’t extras. They were the things generating the energy that made the work possible in the first place. A better mood makes you more creative and more able to face difficult work, and the things that lift your mood are exactly the things that get cut when a deadline hits.
What happens when you drop them
Once the deadline passes, the exhaustion sets in, and the things you used to enjoy feel unfamiliar again because the habit is gone. You end up having to build it all back from scratch, on top of being tired. It’s a pattern we’ve written about before in the deadline burnout pattern that keeps academics stuck, and it tends to repeat itself deadline after deadline unless something changes.
What we tell people, including one client we spoke with recently, is that you can absolutely prioritise when you need to. That’s not the issue. The issue is making sure you still protect your non-negotiables while you do it, the handful of things that energise you, that make life feel meaningful, that keep you fun to be around. They’re not separate from the work. They’re part of what gets the work done.
If you’d like some support working out what your non-negotiables actually are, and how to hold onto them under pressure, that’s exactly the kind of thing we help with.
If this sounds familiar at work, our ADHD leadership coaching helps leaders and managers build support around what gets in the way.
