The promotion and the twins arrived within the same three months. People kept telling me it was wonderful timing. It was not wonderful timing. It was, however, extremely clarifying.
You cannot optimise your way out of finite time
For most of my career I’d treated time like a budget with room to trim. Cut an inefficiency here, batch a task there, and you find more hours. That stops being true when there are genuinely no hours to find. The only lever left is deciding what doesn’t get done — and being honest that “everything” is not an option.
What actually helped
Ruthless triage over heroics. The weeks I tried to do it all were the worst weeks. The weeks I picked the three things that mattered and let the rest slide were the ones I look back on without wincing.
Saying the quiet part out loud at work. I told my team plainly that I’d be less available for a while and where the hard boundaries were. Nobody minded. People mind uncertainty far more than they mind limits.
Lowering the bar on purpose. A good-enough dinner, a short walk instead of a proper run, a two-line reply instead of a considered one. Done beat perfect every single time.
What I got wrong
I waited far too long to accept help — from family, from colleagues, from anyone. I confused coping alone with competence. They are not the same thing, and pretending they are just means everyone around you is worse off while you prove a point to nobody.
If there’s a throughline, it’s this: the year didn’t reward effort. It rewarded honesty about what I could carry.
Who's writing
I'm a senior manager at a UK accountancy firm, with a particular interest in construction and inheritance tax — and, off the clock, a parent of three under three. Carried Forward is where I write about money, work, and the decisions that shape both, in plain English and without the jargon.