This summer, I have five trips to Michigan.
Two college visits. July 4 with family. A weekend with my college girlfriends. And soon, a week at my beloved Higgins Lake.
It is all the wonderful stuff of life.
And still, at the end of every trip, the same voice starts talking.
You have so much to catch up on.
The voice has been saying this to me for at least 30 years.
It sounds responsible. Industrious, even.
It is also a lie.
There is no catching up.
Catching up assumes there is some magical point when every email has been answered, every task completed, every loose end tied up, and you can finally sit back and say, "There. Now I am current."
That point does not exist.
There will always be another email. Another request. Another decision. Another thing that suddenly becomes urgent because someone else forgot to plan.
The belief that we should be caught up does not make us more effective. It makes us frantic.
We return from time away and immediately begin trying to compensate for having had a life. We fill the calendar. We start with the inbox. We confuse speed with leadership.
We may even say, "Going on vacation is just not worth it."
Wait. What?
A different set of questions.
This summer, I have been experimenting with different questions.
Not: How can I get everything done?
But: What deserves my best energy today?
And: How do I want to feel when this day is over?
Those questions do not make the work disappear. They make me choose.
That is the part we often avoid.
Because "I'm catching up" sounds much more virtuous than "I decided this mattered more."
But leadership is deciding.
What the best leaders actually do.
The leaders I admire most do not seem perpetually rushed.
It is not because they have less to do. It is because they have stopped using completion as the measure of a good day.
They measure the day by whether their attention went where it mattered most.
Most of us respond to re-entry by trying to make up for lost time.
But time away was not lost.
And trying to repay it by exhausting ourselves may be exactly backward.
There is no catching up.
There is only choosing what deserves today.