At any given time, many people are running a mental scale. On one side are all the Good Things: the mission, the team, the compensation, the relationships, the work they’re proud of. On the other sits the Bad Things: a board that doesn’t have their back, a culture that’s turned toxic, a workload that never lets up, the creeping feeling that nothing they do is ever enough.

They keep adjusting the balance, trying to find more good things or ‘reframe’ the bad things to lighten the weight, hoping that if they just get the math right, the scales will finally settle somewhere that feels okay. That they’ll feel a little less burned out.

But they never do… because that’s the wrong model.

When it comes to your happiness at work (or the project you’re working on, or the relationship you’re in, etc) good and bad aren’t weights you can balance against each other. At a certain point, no amount of good can cancel out the bad.

Because good and bad aren’t a scale. They’re a floor and a ceiling. They are two separate thresholds that operate independently of one another. And once you see that, you’ll realize the balancing act you’ve been doing was never going to make you feel better.

The Maximum Bad, Minimum Good Thresholds

This is my Floor and Ceiling mental model.

When deciding whether to stay in a job, or continue a project, or remain in a relationship, you should have two separate thresholds:

• A Minimum Good Floor

• A Maximum Bad Ceiling

For something to be worth continuing, you need to be above the floor AND below the ceiling, at the same time, always.

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The Good Floor.

First, your situation has to clear a floor. At work, that might mean the work needs to align with your passion or offer a certain salary or provide opportunities for travel or come with a kick ass team. In a relationship, it might mean respect, support, and feeling seen. Whatever your situation, these things are the bare minimums, and if what’s going on doesn’t meet or exceed these, you already have your answer. It’s a non-starter.

The Bad Ceiling.

There are also things that simply cannot be exceeded. Not balanced out, not justified, not waited out. I mean dealbreakers. At work, it might be a boss who undermines you, a culture that’s contrary to your values, boundaries that get crossed. In a relationship, you probably know your red flags, maybe the smoke or they don’t live in the same city as you. It’s different for everyone, but these are your non-negotiables. Once one of them is crossed, it’s over, full stop.

The Hard Part

That all seems straightforward enough. Problem is, people don’t feel things in such a black-and-white way.

You will find yourself one day in a position where the good is genuinely, undeniably good. The mission lights you up or the team is the best you’ve ever worked with or the work is some of the most meaningful you’ve done. And then something crosses your bad ceiling. And suddenly you’re facing the most disorienting version of this problem… because leaving doesn’t feel logical. You’re walking away from something that still feels, in a lot of ways, remarkable.

I don’t dismiss that. The good is real. Its value is real.

But Good can’t determine the outcome on its own. The two thresholds shouldn’t talk to each other. The ceiling doesn’t care how high the Good is. And if you choose to stay after your maximum Bad has been crossed, you’ve started a clock, waiting for the situation to correct itself. Asking the question again and again, running the math one more time.

But you already have your answer.

The ceiling doesn’t care how far above the floor the Good is. When the Bad Ceiling gets crossed, it’s crossed, No amount of good brings you back.

This is the moment your integrity and self-respect are most hard tested. Stop the project. End the Relationship. Quit the Job. Your happiness and health and your principles need to come first

The Expensive Miscalculation

It’s easy to brand suffering as perseverance. To tell yourself the sacrifice is admirable, that commitment means pushing through. Let me hold your hand when I say this: no. That’s an expensive miscalculation. The cost of staying past your Maximum Bad will show up in your decisions, in how you lead, in what you’re able to give the people who actually need you at your best. The damage rarely stays contained.

I never tell people to ‘look on the bright side’.

I ask: has something crossed your line? (Not a line you’re drawing in frustration, or a bad week or a hard quarter… but a genuine dealbreaker, something you knew mattered before it was tested.)

And most of the time, they already know. Maybe they’ve known for a while. They just needed a model that stopped asking them to keep doing the math.

When your maximum bad threshold is crossed, the answer is clear and simple.

Questions You Can Ask Yourself

• Has something happened that I previously said was non-negotiable?

• If a friend described this situation to me, would I tell them to stay?

• Am I staying because the situation is healthy or because leaving feels hard?

• What would have to change immediately for this to fall back below my ceiling?

• If nothing changed for the next year, would I still choose to be here?

Final Thought

You need to know your floor and respect your ceiling. The good and the bad are not in conversation with each other. They don’t negotiate. Your floor tells you what you need to stay. Your ceiling tells you when it’s time to go. Know both. Honor both. That’s the whole model.

⏱️Got a minute?

These might be the most expensive three words in your workplace. This seemingly harmless question (delivered as a desk drop-by or a Teams ping) can destroy your team’s ability to do deep work and your ability to move the needle on the big stuff.

I learned this the hard way. Early in my career as a new exec, I’d sit down at my desk in the morning, get that first ping, and before I knew it, the entire morning had vanished. Person after person would show up with their ‘quick question.’ ...And my desire to help and be a resource ended up undermining my own effectiveness.

Here’s what I eventually realized: If you don’t decide what deserves your attention, other people will decide for you.

Every got a minute is someone else deciding what deserves your focus. And if you let them, your entire day... entire quarter ...entire year becomes a series of other people’s priorities.

The real problem ultimately is that this got a minute behavior becomes a shortcut around critical thinking and planning. Instead of staff reflecting on whether something is truly urgent, crafting a clear question, or batching communication, people default to instant interruption. It’s easier to grab someone than to think through what you actually need. But that ease comes at a massive cost to everyone’s productivity.

Make the Fix

Have I convinced you to break the habit but not sure where to begin? Great, I got you. Here is a laundry list of ways I’ve tried to set (or reset) this norm at the places I work.

• Leaders start here: You must admit your guilt & set the new expectation. I’m sure you have also been guilty of this got a minute behavior. When you own your contribution to the problem, people are more willing to own theirs. I named the impact, spoke to what everyone was feeling (the need for deep work time), and set a new expectation with my department heads... then follow through by modelling.

• Staff start here: Ask yourself three questions before interrupting. Is this blocking my immediate work? Can I work around it? Can I write it down clearly? If not truly urgent, maintain a running list for your one-on-one or send a single, well-composed message.

• Stay Curious but hold the line: When someone approaches you, ask: Is this urgent? If not, you need to resist the urge to help in the moment and redirect. Tell them to add it to your next 1-1 agenda, put it in an email, or that you’ll get back to them by end of day. But whatever you do, don’t solve it in the moment... you’ll only reinforce the behavior.

• Calibrate sense of urgency. Similar to staying curious, don’t just ask is this urgent, by Why is this urgent? or Could this wait? And, if someone truly thinks they need your help, figure out the timeframe: Do they need you right now, or by end of day, or can it wait until your one-on-one?

• 🚗Use a Parking Lot. This is a place where you literally ‘park’ ideas. Note issues as they arise in a shared document, teams/slack thread, or meeting notes, then batch them for discussion later. As a leader I also have a parking lot for ideas that pop up as I’m working on something, to help me keep focused.

• ⛔Use office hours or open blocks. Set specific times (e.g., 3-4pm daily) when you’re available for drop-ins. Outside those hours, everything goes to the parking lot unless genuinely urgent.

• 📄Create a shared running doc for each direct report. Maintain a shared document both you and your direct report own. Both of you add items throughout the week, then work through it in your 1-on-1. You can grab mine here, if you need a place to start.

• ❓Batch your questions. Keep a note on your phone or your notebook of things you need from each person, then send one message with 3-4 items instead of four separate interruptions. (Or use your shared documents/Wait until your 1-1s)

• ⏱️Time-block your calendar for deep work. Literally put ‘Deep work, no meetings’ on your calendar. Treat it like any other meeting. It’s not rude; it’s professional.

⭐And finally, most simply, you just have to get comfortable saying no. It only gets easier through practice.

A quick word on being ‘approachable.’

I know that people worry that setting boundaries will make them seem uncooperative or unapproachable (especially as a woman). Totally fair, and I’ve experienced it myself. Here’s what’ I’ve seen in the field though: if everyone understands the expectation, and its set as a team value, it’s easier to enforce without this negative repercussion. It is critical that leaders actually lead this culture shift by setting and holding the line with the whole team, reminding people proactively over a period of months, and immediately addressing out-of-sync behavior.

Final Note

It will take time to calibrate your team, but this is about protecting attention so deep work can happen. The habit of got a minute? reveals a team that hasn’t established communication protocols or learned to distinguish urgent from important. Fix this, and you’ll reclaim not just your morning... but your team’s ability to do work that actually matters.

💡Leaders: What are ways you set and protect deep focus time on your teams?

Working in the nonprofit space, I’ve seen this up close. Good people, people who care deeply, burning themselves down in the name of the cause. Helping others at the cost of themselves, their relationships, their health. I looked up the author and found this was actually part of a longer passage:

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one’s work for peace. It destroys one’s inner capacity of peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one’s work because it kills the roots of inner wisdom which make work fruitful.” — Thomas Merton

The cruel part is that this overwork turns into martyrdom and looks like virtue. The exhaustion becomes a badge. But Merton is saying something sharper: the hustle isn’t just unsustainable, it’s counterproductive. It “kills the roots of inner wisdom which make work fruitful.” You can’t pour from an empty vessel, sure… but more than that, you can’t think clearly from a scattered one.

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Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a monk, writer, and mystic. He entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941 and spent the rest of his life there, writing prolifically on spirituality, contemplation, social justice, and interfaith dialogue. His autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain became a surprise bestseller and brought monasticism into mainstream American conversation. What made him unusual was the range…. he corresponded with everyone from Czesław Miłosz to Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote about Zen Buddhism and nuclear proliferation, and managed to be both a cloistered monk and deeply engaged with the political turmoil of his time.

Your team needs a housekeeping happy hour: a two to three hour block of time, on the clock, at least once a month, where everyone stops executing and starts improving how you work.

I’m talking about dedicated time to update that clunky template, write the SOPs that only live in someone’s head, tackle overdue training, or fix the frustrating operating dynamic with another department. All those process improvements you know you need but never have time for… this is when they happen.

There’s a meditation principle that has always stuck with me: the moments when you feel you don’t have time to meditate are precisely when you need it most. The same paradox applies to organizational housekeeping. When your team is drowning in deliverables, carving out time for process improvements seems impossible. But that’s exactly when you need it most.

Figure out where to start by asking these questions:

• What task or process made you think ‘there has to be a better way to do this’ in the past two weeks?

• What question do you keep answering over and over because it’s not documented anywhere?

• If you could eliminate one friction point that slows down your work every single week, what would it be?

Some of the housekeeping work I’ve done in the pats included:

• Updating templates and tools my team used regularly so they reflect current processes instead of outdated workflows

• Writing SOPs for tasks that only lived in one person’s head.

• Completed training modules for a new piece of software that kept getting pushed to “later”

• Streamlined handoffs with other departments and having the conversations I’ve been avoiding about what’s not working

• Cleaned up shared drives, project boards, or documentation so information is actually findable when people need it

• Made a workflow improvement I’ve been thinking about for months.

• Cleared-out that backlog of ‘low urgency’ communications.

Here’s what makes this most effective: make it organization-wide.

When everyone is doing housekeeping at the same time, you’re not interrupting one another. No one is pulling you into their urgent priority, nor is your inbox or chats swelling with asks. Everyone knows what everyone should be doing. It’s easier to stay focused when the entire organization is aligned on the same priority. You create a collective rhythm of improvement rather than isolated attempts that get derailed.

The parking lot changes everything.

Once you have housekeeping sessions scheduled, you can then just maintain a running list… a parking lot, so to speak… for all those little fixes that come up. Whenever you encounter something that could use improvement but you don’t have time to address right now, you add it to your work plan for a future housekeeping session. Suddenly there’s a plan to address the deficiency. It’s no longer taking up mental space or creating low-grade stress. You know exactly when you’ll handle it.

You need to build in time to get better at what you do.

Because organizations that want to keep getting better have to build in time for getting better. You can’t optimize on the fly while you’re executing. The irony is that when teams feel most overwhelmed, they’re often drowning in inefficiencies they haven’t had time to fix … that’s likely driving the overwhelm. That outdated template adds fifteen minutes to every event setup. That undocumented process means the same questions get asked repeatedly. That frustrating handoff wastes time in every project cycle.

Housekeeping time is an investment that pays dividends. It’s the difference between running faster on a treadmill and actually moving forward.

Here’s how to get it right:

• Schedule it now. Schedule it consistently.
  Pick a recurring time slot. First Friday afternoon of every month, last Thursday morning, whatever works. Put it on the calendar for the next six months.

• Create your parking lot.
  Set up a simple document or project board where team members can add items as they come up. This becomes your menu of options for each session. You can have an org-wide one and/or individual lots.

• Set the ground rules.
  No meetings during this time. Email off. Slack/Teams/Messages on do-not-disturb. Come prepared with a plan for what you’ll work on from your parking lot.

• Make it visible.
  Let everyone know this is happening organization-wide so they can plan accordingly and protect the time.

The work of working better together is foundational. Exceptional organizations understand this and intentionally create space for this work.

💡 Question: Does your team have a practice like this? What's worked (or hasn't) for creating space to improve how you work?

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📌 PS - If you found this post helpful, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience? This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will help organizations work better together. 🙏

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