Hey Rockstars,

So yesterday, I made a small mistake at work: not a catastrophic mistake by any means, and not even something that couldn’t be fixed or had any lasting consequences, but a mistake nonetheless. And I was annoyed with myself, because it was something I should have caught. In fact, I’d caught it correctly the first time around, only to miss it when the document came back through for another round of revisions. Which, of course, made the whole thing even more frustrating.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that accuracy isn’t important because, of course, attention to detail matters. I work with some extraordinarily talented people whose attention to detail, judgment, and ability to manage complicated matters I genuinely admire. I want to be as good at my job as they are, and I know that means being careful, learning from mistakes, and taking responsibility when something goes wrong.

But also, for the love of God, I am a human being.

The 99% Problem

I’ve been taking on greater responsibility at work recently, helping manage assignments, making decisions, keeping things moving, and doing an enormous amount of work that I’m proud of. And yet, there’s something about making one mistake that can make all the things you’ve done correctly feel suddenly irrelevant. You can get ninety-nine things right, and the hundredth thing becomes the subject of discussion.

My friend at work said something that has stayed with me: “I yearn for a job where being 99% great is OK.”

Since he said it, I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Because in a profession where the expectation is that you catch everything, a mistake can feel like more than a mistake. It can feel like evidence that you’re careless, or not sufficiently detail-oriented, or not quite as capable as everyone thought you were. Never mind the hours of work that went into getting everything else right. That was expected. The one thing you missed is what needs explaining.

And I understand why the standards are high, and I pretty much agree that they should be. We all need to proofread documents and take responsibility for our work. But I wonder where along the way we’ve confused demanding excellence with expecting infallibility.

Maybe it would be nice to be a perfect law robot someday. Imagine how convenient that would be: I’d catch every typo, remember every deadline, anticipate every question, and produce flawless work on the first attempt. I could probably get through an entire day without needing coffee, too, although I’m not sure I’d want to give that up.

Yet for the time being, I remain human.

And I’ve been thinking about how we respond to mistakes, because I don’t think those responses are irrelevant to the quality of the work itself. A friend once told me about something a judge she clerked for used to say: “There’s very few things you can do that I can’t fix.”

I’ve always loved that sentiment. Not because mistakes don’t matter, or because everything can be fixed, but because it recognizes that people are learning. Being a law clerk or an associate means taking on responsibility, doing your best, and inevitably encountering things you haven’t done before. Having someone senior who responds to mistakes with perspective and confidence, rather than panic or condemnation, can make an enormous difference. It communicates confidence in the people around you and a willingness to help them learn without making every correction feel like a professional crisis.

If I were supervising an otherwise excellent junior associate who made an ordinary, fixable mistake, I’d want them to know that I recognized how much good work they were doing. I’d want to correct the problem, explain what needs to happen differently next time, and move forward. I wouldn’t want them spending the rest of the afternoon wondering whether I had lost confidence in them. Because I know that feeling, and it isn’t particularly productive.

A Slight Detour Into Operations Management

Anyway, this whole experience got me thinking about something else, which is how I somehow keep ending up in MBA classes at exactly the time my life needs them. The latest is my Operations Management class, which seems to be explaining my own life back to me.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Operations Management is essentially the study of how systems and processes work. We study capacity, bottlenecks, utilization, variability, waiting times, and how to improve processes so they function more effectively. It’s genuinely fascinating to me, especially because I love learning how seemingly small changes to a process can have enormous effects on the system as a whole.

What I find slightly less delightful is realizing that I have been enthusiastically violating some of the principles I’m learning.

Because here’s the thing about my life: I do a lot.

I have my job, I’m getting my MBA, I’m involved in professional organizations, I volunteer, I help organize events and programming, I write this blog, and I have an unreasonable number of interests that I would like to spend more time exploring. I also have friends, family, and people I love who deserve considerably more than whatever remains of my attention after I’ve finished everything else. I don’t want the people I love to get whatever time is left over. I want to make time for them because they’re important to me, too.

And I genuinely enjoy much of it. I like learning new things, being involved in organizations I care about, bringing people together, and creating things that wouldn’t have existed without someone putting in the effort. My legal work challenges me intellectually, but it doesn’t necessarily fulfill all the creative parts of me. Some of the activities I pursue outside work are precisely what make my life feel meaningful and interesting.

And to put a finer point on it: I also enjoy being good at things, accomplishing things, and yes, I enjoy it when people are impressed by how much I do.

I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Sometimes someone tells me they don’t know how I manage everything, and my reaction is essentially, hell yeah, look at me go. It’s a wonderful feeling. The problem, of course, is that doing all the things that make me feel accomplished also requires an extraordinary amount of time and energy.

The Clockwork of My Life

And this is where Operations Management comes in. Sometimes I think of my life as one of those beautiful, intricate mechanical watches, with hundreds of tiny gears and components working together to keep everything moving. I’ve always found those mechanisms fascinating. Each part has its own function, and the entire movement depends on these precisely coordinated interactions.

So let me teach you a little about how these watches work.

Unlike quartz watches, which use electronic oscillations to keep time, traditional mechanical watches run on an elaborate system of springs and gears. When you wind a mechanical watch, you’re tightening a coiled metal spring called the mainspring, which stores the energy needed to power the watch. As the spring gradually unwinds, it releases that energy through a series of interconnected gears called the gear train. These gears transfer the energy through the movement, with different gear ratios controlling how the hands advance.

If the mainspring simply released all its energy at once, the gears would spin far too quickly, and the watch wouldn’t keep time properly. That’s where the escapement and balance wheel come in. The balance wheel oscillates back and forth at a remarkably consistent rhythm, while the escapement allows the gears to advance in tiny, controlled increments. Together, they regulate the release of energy and produce that familiar ticking sound.

It’s an extraordinary little feat of engineering. An entire mechanism made up of tiny, interconnected components, each doing its part to ensure that the hands move at precisely the right pace. And all of this is happening inside something small enough to sit on your wrist.

That’s a little how I’ve organized my life. Work, business school, professional organizations, friendships, family commitments, and everything else I’ve decided to take on. I’ve figured out where everything fits, how to move from one responsibility to the next, and how to accomplish an extraordinary amount within a limited number of hours. When everything goes according to plan, the mechanism runs beautifully.

But introduce even a grain of sand in just the wrong place, and suddenly things stop moving quite so smoothly. A meeting runs longer than expected, an assignment requires another round of revisions, or something unexpected comes up that needs my attention. Suddenly, the hour I’d allocated to one task is gone, so that task gets pushed back, which pushes something else back, and before I know it, my carefully coordinated schedule is out of alignment.

The problem isn’t necessarily the interruption, because these are ordinary things that happen when you’re a person with a multifaceted life. The problem is that I’ve become very good at organizing everything around the assumption that nothing unexpected will happen. And, as it turns out, this is not an especially realistic assumption.

A Very Brief Lesson in Queueing Theory

In Operations Management, we talk about utilization, which describes how much of a resource’s available capacity is being used. And one of the interesting things about systems operating at very high utilization is that they often become less responsive to variability. In other words, the closer a system gets to operating at full capacity, the less room it has to accommodate anything unexpected.

There’s a relationship we study called VUT: Variability, Utilization, and Time. It helps explain why waiting times can increase dramatically when a system gets too busy.

Let’s imagine a coffee shop with one barista who can make ten drinks per hour. If customers are ordering eight drinks per hour, the barista is operating at 80% utilization. That’s simply the average demand divided by the barista’s capacity. Now imagine that demand increases to 9.5 drinks per hour. The barista is operating at 95% utilization, meaning there’s very little spare capacity left.

But utilization is only part of the equation. We also have to consider variability, which is how unpredictable the work is. Maybe customers arrive in a steady stream, or maybe six people walk in at once. Maybe everyone orders a straightforward latte, or maybe somebody wants a particularly complicated drink that takes twice as long to prepare. Both the timing of arrivals and the time required to complete each order can vary.

Finally, there’s time, which refers to how long it takes to actually prepare a drink. The VUT relationship combines these factors to estimate how long customers might spend waiting before the barista can begin their orders.

Here’s the thing though. In a simplified model with one barista, the utilization component is calculated by dividing utilization by one minus utilization. At 80%, that gives us 4. At 95%, it gives us 19. That’s nearly five times as large, even though utilization has increased by only fifteen percentage points! The numbers aren’t minutes of waiting; they’re multipliers used in estimating waiting time. But assuming the other factors remain the same, the model predicts that the average wait could increase by nearly five times.

Now, before anyone starts applying these numbers to my Outlook calendar, I should clarify that this is a mathematical relationship from queueing theory, not a formula for calculating the likelihood that I’ll have a stress-induced breakdown on a Thursday afternoon. Human beings are more complicated than queues, and I don’t think my professor intended for me to treat myself as a particularly temperamental service station.

But the underlying idea is fascinating. When a system is already operating close to capacity, even a relatively small disruption can create an outsized delay because there isn’t much room to absorb it. And I keep thinking about how familiar that sounds.

Maximum Capacity Isn’t Sustainable Capacity

Those of you who read The Anxiety Budget, know that when I have a lot going on, I’m often incredibly productive. When I’m less busy, I lose momentum and procrastinate. Other times, after a particularly intense stretch, I’m so exhausted that even a long to-do list isn’t enough to motivate me. I can go from doing an extraordinary amount of work to staring at thirty obligations over the weekend and feeling absolutely no desire to do any of them.

And I think I’ve been confusing my maximum capacity with my sustainable capacity

Because when I’m in one of those extraordinarily productive stretches, I feel great about how much I’m accomplishing. I’m getting things done, meeting deadlines, and keeping all the gears turning. It’s easy to look at that and think, well, clearly I can manage all of this. And I can! The question is how long I can keep managing it at that pace.

Just because I can manage an extraordinary amount of work for two weeks doesn’t necessarily mean I can continue doing it indefinitely. And just because I’m still meeting deadlines doesn’t mean the rest of my life is functioning particularly well.

Which, unfortunately, brings us to preventive maintenance. This is another Operations Management concept that I understand quite well in theory. Machines and systems need maintenance. You can’t simply run something at full capacity indefinitely, ignore wear and tear, and then act surprised when it stops functioning properly.

My friend Silvana recently asked me whether I proactively make time for fun and recovery during overwhelming periods or whether I simply push through until I can’t anymore. She was explaining that when she’s been particularly busy, she tries to deliberately do something enjoyable to rebalance. An excellent question.

You know the kinds of things that count as preventive maintenance for a human being: drinking enough water, getting adequate sleep, moving my body mindfully, and doing enjoyable things without feeling like I need to earn them first (oops). Do I understand why these things matter? Absolutely. Do I consistently do them? Absolutely not.

I have a graduate-level understanding of preventive maintenance and an elementary-school-level commitment to drinking water.

And I have two rather different approaches to downtime.

In the first, I’ll put on Arthur, yes the PBSKids show, and attempt to relax while simultaneously thinking about all the work I should be doing. So I’m technically watching television, but mentally I’ve got a running list of unfinished obligations, and I’m not entirely enjoying myself.

In the second, I’ve reached a point where I am completely out of energy and patience. My phone goes on airplane mode, Teams says I’m Away, and cereal becomes an acceptable meal at any hour. Now, I happen to think cereal is an excellent dinner, and there’s nothing wrong with spending an afternoon watching cartoons. But I do find it interesting that I can be so reluctant to make room for rest while I’m busy, only to reach a point where I have very little energy left to do anything else.

And the consequences aren’t limited to being tired.

Lately, I’ve noticed that I sometimes have less time and energy for people I love. Last night, Michael asked if Katie and I wanted to get dinner and drinks and we were genuinely relieved we were all free to hang. We hadn’t seen one another in weeks, which is unusually long for us. And I missed them!! Somewhere between all my responsibilities, the ordinary pleasure of spending time together had become something we needed to deliberately fit into our calendars.

That’s the part I don’t particularly like. Because my friendships aren’t some optional extra that I can permanently defer until I’ve finished being productive. They’re part of why I enjoy my life in the first place. And that’s what makes the solution more complicated than simply deciding to do fewer things.

Some of my commitments are demanding because they’re important to me. I don’t want to give up the professional organizations where I get to build community and develop programs. I don’t want to stop writing. I don’t want to abandon the opportunities that have allowed me to learn and grow. I’ve worked hard to become someone who gets to do these things, and I find enormous fulfillment in them.

But I also don’t want to be so tired from building a fulfilling life that I no longer have the energy to enjoy it.

And somewhere in the middle of thinking about all this, I realized there’s another Operations Management concept that might be relevant…

Sometimes I’m the Bottleneck

A bottleneck is the part of a process that limits how much the system can accomplish. Sometimes the bottleneck in my life is obvious. There’s a deadline, a limited number of hours, or something I can’t move forward until another person responds.

Sometimes, though, I think I might be the bottleneck.

Not because I’m incapable, but because I occasionally refuse to accept that I have finite capacity. I’ll agree to something because it sounds interesting and worthwhile, without fully accounting for the commitments I’ve already made. I’ll spend more time on something than it needs because I want to do it exceptionally well. I’ll postpone maintenance because there are other things that feel more urgent.

My tarot readings have repeatedly suggested that I need to get out of my own way, and I am deeply amused that my business school curriculum has now provided an entirely separate framework for arriving at a similar conclusion.

But I also don’t want to suggest that every constraint on my time or energy is something I’ve created for myself. Some bottlenecks exist because of the demands of my job, deadlines I don’t control, or expectations I don’t get to set. I can make choices about how I manage my remaining time, but I can’t simply reorganize my way out of every external demand.

Which brings me back to the mistake that started this whole train of thought. Because when something goes wrong in a process, one of the things we study in Operations Management is how to understand why it happened and how the process might be improved. That doesn’t mean nobody is responsible for the mistake. It means that identifying the person who made an error isn’t necessarily the same as identifying everything that contributed to it.

Was the process clear? Was there adequate time? Were the appropriate review steps in place? Were there opportunities to catch the problem before it became consequential?

Sometimes the answer is that somebody simply made a mistake and needs to be more careful next time. That happens, too. And sometimes a process can be improved even when an individual error is the immediate cause of the problem.

But I wonder whether professional environments that demand extraordinarily high standards might sometimes benefit from thinking a little more about the systems that make those standards possible.

Because we spend an enormous amount of time reviewing, revising, checking, and correcting work. Those processes exist precisely because even very good professionals aren’t infallible. The goal is to produce excellent work, not to demonstrate that nobody involved ever needed a second set of eyes.

There’s a cost to making ordinary corrections feel like personal failures.

For me, at least, that cost can be the time and emotional energy spent replaying something I wish I’d done differently, wondering whether I’ve disappointed someone, or worrying that one oversight has changed how people perceive my competence.

It’s a kind of emotional rework, and it takes up capacity, too.

My ability to sustain the life I’ve built isn’t determined solely by how many commitments I take on. It’s also affected by the conditions in which I’m expected to fulfill them, how much room I leave for the unexpected, and whether I’m taking care of the person responsible for keeping the entire operation running. Which is me, unfortunately.

I’m the operations manager, the workforce, the maintenance crew, and, on particularly bad days, the quality-control department.

No wonder the maintenance schedule is a little neglected.

I recently had a conversation about taking on another leadership opportunity, and someone offered a perspective I really appreciated: the time commitment is only worth it if it’s worth it to you.

I can understand the demands on my time, recognize where the bottlenecks are, and identify things that might make my life more manageable. But none of that tells me which commitments are worth making in the first place.

There are things I’m willing to work extraordinarily hard for because I care about them. There are opportunities that might exhaust me but still feel worthwhile. There are commitments I might eventually decide are no longer worth the time or energy they require. And there are some things I haven’t figured out yet.

I’m not trying to optimize my life; I’m trying to participate in it. I still believe that. I don’t want to spend my life calculating the most efficient allocation of my time as though every dinner with a friend, every creative project, and every new opportunity must justify its existence through some measurable return. I want to do things because I love them, because they interest me, because they matter to me. And sometimes, life presents an opportunity, and even if I’m not ready, I want to say yes.

I don’t know exactly what the answer is, and I don’t particularly want to pretend I’ve had some transformative revelation that will cause me to wake up tomorrow and approach every aspect of my life differently. I’ll probably still say yes to something interesting. I’ll probably still get annoyed with myself when I make a mistake. And I’ll probably continue to enjoy the look on someone’s face when they ask how I manage to do everything.

I like my life, and I’m quite proud of it. But somewhere along the way, I think I’ve built something that requires me to operate at my absolute maximum a little too often. And I’m starting to wonder whether there’s a way to keep the things I love without expecting myself to function like a machine that never makes mistakes, never needs maintenance, and never runs out of capacity.

In the meantime, I think I’ll go drink some water.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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