You have probably sat through this one. An offsite, a management course, someone at the front with a glass jar. Big rocks first, then pebbles, then sand poured into the gaps. See? Put the important things in first, and it all fits. Cue the closing beer joke.
Oliver Burkeman caught the trick. “The smug teacher is being dishonest. He has rigged his demonstration by bringing only a few big rocks into the classroom, knowing they’ll all fit.”
Nobody hands you a curated set of rocks. Real life gives you more genuinely important things than any sequencing will hold. So this was never a prioritisation problem. It is an impossible sum.
You will drop big rocks. The only choice is whether you pick which ones, or find out when one lands on your foot.
So far, so agreeable. Here is the part I have started to distrust, including in myself.
“Strategic neglect” has become a respectable word for avoidance.
“I’m not seeing friends much, I’m focused on the business this year” and “I am avoiding my friends and have found a professional-sounding phrase for it” look identical from the outside. Often from the inside too.
Three questions separate them.
Is it named? You can say out loud what you are not doing — not “I’m busy,” the actual thing. Unnamed neglect is drift.
Is it bounded? There is a return date, or a condition that ends it. Neglect with no end is not a season. It is a decision you have not admitted making.
Was the person paying told? This is the one that stings upon realisation. Someone funds your focus: a partner absorbing the extra load, a child getting the tired version of you, a friend who has stopped expecting a reply. If they would describe the arrangement differently than you would, you do not have a strategy. You have an unpaid invoice.
Some rocks go in the jar regardless. Health, money, the people who depend on you. Let one thing lead the season, but set the minimums for everything else before the intensity starts, or the season quietly eats them.
And it will feel bad. Not for a week — the whole season. The nagging sense that you should be catching up never quite goes away. That feeling is not evidence you chose wrong. It is what choosing costs.
The teacher’s jar worked because he chose which rocks to bring. You get all of them, and a jar that was never big enough.
The ones you set down deliberately are being held by someone else. The ones you will not admit you dropped, you keep tripping over.
Named neglect is a choice. Unnamed neglect is a debt, accruing quietly, in someone else’s account.
