Nora is a mom of two working full-time. In the last few years, she’s taken on more and more — managing her sons’ extracurriculars, showing up for every school event, pushing to earn more in her profession. She’s passionate about fitness, home-cooked meals, her social group, her faith, activism, hosting, the environment. She’ll tell you it’s all important.

She’s not wrong. It is all important. That’s exactly the problem.

Nora’s calendar is so full that the only lever she’s been able to pull to get it all done is to sleep less. And slowly, she’s becoming someone she doesn’t recognize — chronically fatigued, agitated, short with the people she loves most. The relationships she’s working so hard to protect are the ones suffering most.

When she came to me, she was in tears. Despite working harder than ever to manage it all, her life was increasingly unmanageable. 

What she needed wasn’t to work harder. She needed to make two hard decisions: what to neglect — and then who to disappoint.

In that order.

Part One: Intentional Neglect

We are all neglecting something. The only question is whether we’re neglecting what matters — or what doesn’t.

When we believe we can do it all, we’re not actually doing it all. We’re just blind to what we’re giving up. Nora wasn’t neglecting nothing. She was neglecting sleep. Her patience. Her presence with the people she loved most. 

Greg McKeown names this precisely in Essentialism:

“There are three deeply entrenched assumptions we must conquer to live the way of the essentialist: ‘I have to,’ ‘It’s all important,’ and ‘I can do both.’… To embrace essentialism requires that we replace these with three core truths: ‘I choose to,’ ‘Only a few things really matter,’ and ‘I can do anything but not everything.'”

The goal isn’t to do less for the sake of doing less. It’s to neglect the non-essential on purpose — so you stop neglecting what’s essential by accident.

This requires making two lists. 

The first list: Essential. The things you most want to protect. The relationships, commitments, and experiences that are non-negotiable to who you are and what matters most.

The second list: Non-Essential. Everything else that is currently competing for your time and attention. Not bad things. Often very good things. Just not essential ones.

When Nora made these two lists, something became undeniable. Her essential list was short: quality time with her family. Her own wellbeing. An important project she had been putting off for years.

Her non-essential list — just for her sons’ activities alone — had over a dozen items. Sports, volunteering, language classes, enrichment programs. All good. None bad. Every single one something she genuinely cared about.

That’s what made it hard. And that’s what made the exercise necessary.

Because when everything is important, nothing is protected. The essential list tells you what you’re fighting for. The non-essential list tells you what you’re willing to let go of in service of it. Without both, you’re just managing a calendar — not designing a life.

Once you’ve given yourself permission to let some things go, the next step becomes inevitable.

You’re going to have to disappoint some people.

Part Two: Disappoint People

Disappointment is unavoidable. There are more invitations than we can accept. More requests for help than we can meet. More bids for attention than we can respond to.

The goal isn’t to avoid disappointing people. It’s to choose who we disappoint.

Imagine concentric circles. At the center: you — and the relationships most essential to who you are. The next ring out: your dearest loved ones. Then close family and friends. Then extended connections. Then colleagues and acquaintances. And at the outermost edge: everybody else.

What I observe in my coaching practice is that, too often, we unintentionally prioritize the outermost circle while disappointing ourselves and those closest to us. It doesn’t always feel that way in the moment. But every yes to a non-essential relationship is a quiet no to an essential one. Time and attention are finite. How we spend them is a zero-sum situation.

Simply put: if not disappointing someone else comes at the cost of disappointing yourself, that’s too high a price.

When Nora could see her lists side by side — what was essential, what wasn’t, and who she’d been prioritizing — something shifted. She stopped asking herself how to fit it all in. She started asking a different question: who deserves my yes?

It helped her start disappointing the right people — and stop disappointing herself.

Nora had to say no to co-chairing a school event she’d already half-committed to. She had to step back from a volunteer leadership role, disappointing people who were counting on her. She had to have a hard conversation with a professional obligation she’d outgrown. None of those were easy. But when she mapped each one against her concentric circles, the answer was the same every time: none of those people were in her inner rings.

For the first time in a long time, the people who mattered most got the best of her.

Where to Start

If you recognize yourself in Nora — if your calendar is full but your most important relationships feel starved for attention — the first step is getting honest about where your time is actually going.

I built a course for exactly this. It walks you through a six-step time audit so you can see clearly where your hours are going, and a five-rule task management framework so you can build a system that works with your life, not against it.

Not more to manage. A clearer way to manage what matters.

Get the course at lifebydesign.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-task.

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Brandy DeOrnellas is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC), Harvard Law graduate, and former attorney based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works with individuals navigating career transitions, career growth, and intentional life design through 1:1 coaching and online courses.

© Life By Design Coaching LLC · bdeornellas.com