Work Will Wait. Life Will Not.

Am I going to die here? 

I couldn’t stop thinking that I would. And I couldn’t stop wondering if I would actually get to marry my soon-to-be husband, see my niece being born, or spend another weekend or holiday with friends and family I held dear but had kept at arm’s length because of the demands of my job.  

I was traveling to Berlin for an event and was under a lot of stress. For weeks leading up to the trip I had spent days filled with meetings, and early mornings and late nights trying to catch up on work that needed to be done. Sleep was practically non-existent because I couldn’t turn my brain off. My physical and mental health suffered, and my relationships with family and friends were put on the back burner because I had no energy left to give.  

On the plane, I dozed off. I couldn’t fight the exhaustion that had been brought on by weeks of frenzied preparation. And while asleep, I stopped breathing. I woke up gasping for air, my chest heaving and aching from the lack of oxygen. I was terrified. I spent the rest of the trip afraid to fall asleep, thinking hard about everything I had sacrificed to get to that point. And wondering if it was worth it.  

For decades I believed that I needed to surrender my health, well-being, and personal time to get the job done. I saw it modeled repeatedly by the most successful planners I knew, and I wanted to be successful too. Since Berlin, though, I’ve come to realize that level of sacrifice is rarely worth what it costs you. The moments that you miss and can never get back are the ones that will haunt you the most. In addition to my health scare, my mother-in-law passed away while I was on that trip. I had been vowing for months to visit but kept putting it off because I was “crazy busy” at work. I think about that a lot and desperately wish I had made different choices. I wish I’d had tools, processes and guardrails in place that would have empowered me to choose my life over my job. 

It’s not usually the volume of work that breaks you.  It's the re-work caused by poorly defined goals and unclear roles and responsibilities. It’s the lack of ownership, erratic decision making, and competing priorities that jeopardize milestones and make you feel like you’re reinventing the wheel. Every. Single. Time. 

Exhausting? Absolutely. Necessary? Absolutely not. There is so much value to creating structure around events, not just from an operational standpoint, but from a personal one. The right tools and processes will allow you to produce consistent, repeatable results more efficiently and effectively. But more importantly, they can save your time and your sanity, and give you back the mental space to actually be present in your own life. 

I’ve forfeited a lot of personal time for my career: countless early mornings, late nights, and weekends that I will never get back (no matter how much I wish I could). For me, the most stressful part of managing events is rarely the event itself. It’s the weeks and months leading up to it, when I’m juggling multiple events, stakeholders, and competing priorities, that cause the most anxiety. That’s when structure, templates, and tools help make the work feel less heavy, removing the guess work of what needs to be done when, by whom, and how. 

I made it home from Berlin. I married my wonderful husband. And my beautiful niece was born. Since then, there have been countless other milestones in my life, large and small, that I’ve been fortunate to be a part of. But I’ve missed a lot of them too. If I’m honest, I fall into old habits too easily; I give work far more weight than it deserves. I’m always tempted to give too much, put a relationship on hold, or postpone something that I want to do. But then, I think about that trip. I think of what I might have missed if I didn’t make it home. And I remind myself that work will wait. Life will not.  

What will you choose?