It’s 8:47 on a Sunday night.
You’re mid-sentence in something that actually matters to you. A framework you’ve been refining. A side project you’ve been circling for months. Something that’s yours.
Then your phone lights up. A Slack message from your manager’s manager. Or a client. Or someone who has never once worried about interrupting you because they have never had to.
You read it. You feel the pull. That familiar low-grade dread that lives somewhere between your chest and your stomach, the one that says: if I don’t respond, there will be a consequence.
So you respond. Within five minutes. Because not responding feels worse than whatever you were doing before it arrived.
And the thing that was yours gets closed. Again.