When Nothing Is Sacred, Everything Drifts

How one non-negotiable practice can restore rhythm, reduce isolation, and signal what you truly value.

A fully flexible calendar sounds like freedom. In practice, it is one of the most effective ways to slowly dismantle everything that makes leadership sustainable.

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Leadership can be a surprisingly lonely place.

You’re responsible for the people around you, but the nature of the role creates distance. Decisions land on your desk that you can’t fully share. Pressures accumulate that aren’t yours to offload. And in a corporate environment where calendars are public property and urgency is the default currency, even the relationships that matter most can quietly erode — meeting by meeting, cancellation by cancellation.

I decided to do something about it.

I batched all 7 of my team one-on-ones into a single afternoon each week and made them non-negotiable. Conflicting invites got declined. When a team member needed to reschedule, I didn’t offer them a different day — I asked them to swap their slot with a colleague’s. The afternoon stayed intact, every week.

What that consistency communicated was entirely intentional. Not just efficiency or good management practice, but something more human: you are worth protecting. The rhythm became a standing signal that these relationship building moments were not flexible — not because of policy, but because people matter.

One protected afternoon. One non-negotiable anchor. It didn’t solve the loneliness of leadership. But it gave it somewhere to sigh.

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A week without anchors isn’t freedom — it’s drift. The pressure to stay perpetually available quietly dismantles the very rhythms that keep a leader grounded, connected, and capable of leading with joy. What we protect reveals what we actually value.

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Anchors that resist the urgency culture

There is a particular kind of pressure that lives in the modern workplace — not the pressure of a deadline or a difficult conversation, but the ambient pressure of availability. The unspoken assumption that every open slot is fair game. That to decline is to disengage. That flexibility and responsiveness are the same thing.

They aren’t. Flexibility without limits isn’t agility. It’s erosion.

Research on daily routines and psychological well-being is striking on this point. Individuals who report lower levels of structured routine consistently show higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms than those with more predictable patterns in their days.¹ The structure itself — not its content — is what confers a sense of control. A week that holds its shape under pressure is a fundamentally different experience from one that reshapes itself around every new demand.

The first thing an anchor does is push back. It says: already booked. In a culture that mistakes busyness for responsiveness, that refusal of something incoming is not a failure of leadership. It is one of its clearest expressions of safeguarding.

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Anchors that sustain the joy of leading

There is a version of leadership that runs entirely on willpower. It holds every meeting, answers every message, and stays available for every emergency. It is impressive for a season. And then it isn’t sustainable.

Jerry Colonna, writing in Reboot, describes the hollowness that can settle in when relentless activity becomes a substitute for meaning — when busyness is the mechanism by which we avoid noticing how we actually feel.² That observation landed hard when I first read it. The 192-event year I once navigated — building an arts organization from a handful of events to a full season — taught me the same lesson the harder way: rhythms made excellence sustainable; the absence of anchors made it expensive.

Joy in leadership is not a destination you arrive at once the work settles. It is cultivated in the small, protected practices that make the work worth doing in the first place. James Clear, in Atomic Habits, makes the case that habits formed through consistent, repeated practice in stable contexts gradually become automatic — freeing the cognitive and emotional capacity you need for what actually matters.³ The protected practice doesn’t drain you. Over time, it restores you.

An anchor doesn’t just hold you in place. It keeps joy within reach.

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Anchors that signal safety to your team

Here is something worth sitting with: the people you lead are watching what you protect.

They notice whether you make time for them or cancel. They register whether your patterns are reliable or permeable. They read your consistency — or its absence — as information about their own worth. Research on leadership and workplace loneliness confirms that promotion to leadership roles often increases isolation, partly because the structural distance created between leaders and their former peers erodes the interpersonal support that once sustained them.⁴ That distance is real. But it is not inevitable.

A protected rhythm communicates something that no performance review or team-building exercise can fully replicate: I chose to be here, regularly, because you matter. In an orchestra, the conductor’s downbeat at the start of a rehearsal isn’t only a technical signal — it’s a relational one. It says: we begin together, at a known time, in a known way. The ensemble settles. Something in the room shifts.

Your team needs a downbeat. A rhythm they can count on. One anchor, held consistently, can do more to build a culture of trust than a year of open-door policies.

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The Joyful Excellence Playbook™ tools I am developing aren’t about constructing a perfect schedule. They’re about identifying the one practice worth protecting — and then protecting it with your whole leadership self. Not because you have to. Because you know what it costs when you don’t.

You may not be able to control the urgency culture around you. You can’t stop the meeting invites or quiet the ambient noise of organizational life. But you can decide, this week, that one thing is non-negotiable. One afternoon. One practice. One anchor.

Start there. Hold it. See what forms around it.

What is the one practice in your week that, if protected consistently, would most change how you lead — and how your team experiences you?

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Endnotes