Last week, my fifteen-year-old woke up complaining of a sore throat.

I’ll be honest: my reaction was skepticism. “Sore throat” has historically been code in our house for I’m tired and I don’t want to go to school, a mysterious ailment that’s conveniently difficult to verify. But this time, he pulled out his iPhone, turned on the flashlight, and held it up to his tonsils. Yikes!  

I’m a bit embarrassed by my next reaction.  I should’ve been concerned.  I wasn’t.  I felt inconvenienced.  Well, now I have to cancel my morning and take him to the doctor.

That stopped me. Rather than worry about his well being, my first thought was how this impacts me.  

I’ve been thinking about this ever since. 

I’m someone who loves work … genuinely loves it. I wake up energized. I keep a full calendar. I find deep meaning in the projects I’m building and the people I get to lead and develop. That’s not a complaint. But here’s the shadow side of that: I’ve structured my life so tightly around the work I love that there’s no room for anything that feels like friction.

Friction, in my world, is anything that disrupts the plan. The DMV. The dry cleaner. The doctor’s appointment I’ve been rescheduling for three months because I “don’t have time.” (Let’s be real – I have time for the things I want to do. What I don’t have is the will to make time for the unsexy, inconvenient stuff.)

And that’s the problem. When you build a life with zero margin, every normal human obligation feels like a crisis. A sick kid. An overdue errand. A car that needs maintenance. These aren’t emergencies, they’re just life. But if you’ve packed your schedule wall to wall, they land like emergencies.

Here’s what I’m taking away from my son’s sore throat.

I don’t need to slow down. I need to plan less. There’s a difference. Slowing down implies doing less of the work I love. Planning less means creating intentional white space – not for nothing, but for the inevitable. For the things that remind me I’m a person, not just a professional.

My practical fix? Once a month, I’m carving out a half-day for what I call “life admin,” appointments, errands, the boring but necessary maintenance of being a functioning adult. Not as a burden. As a scheduled, legitimate part of my week. Because when those things have a home on my calendar, a sick kid on a Tuesday doesn’t feel like a derailment. It feels like exactly what it is: a moment where I get to show up for someone I love.

Friction isn’t the enemy. A schedule with no room for it is.