For eleven years I could tell you my effective hourly rate to the dollar. Ask me on any given Tuesday and I would have had it, give or take, the way some people always know roughly where their keys are. What I could not have told you was the last time I had watched the sky get light. Those two facts turn out to be the same fact.
The work trains you to see everything as cost and return. It is a useful lens and I was good with it. A client would describe a problem and I would already be building the model, the levers, the sensitivities, the one chart that would land the room. I ran my own life the same way. Mornings were the inefficiency. Six-forty alarm, phone first, inbox triaged before my feet hit the floor, a car to the airport while I pretended the driver was not there. I optimised the morning until there was nothing left in it but transit.
A model will not show you this. The first hour of the day is not fungible. You cannot move it to the evening at a better rate, it does not roll over, there is no carry. I had been treating it as working capital, something to deploy, and it was never that. It was the principal. I spent the principal every single morning and booked it as a saving.
I did not have a breakdown, which almost disappoints people when I tell this. No collapse, no doctor, no dramatic exit. What happened was smaller and I think worse. My son, who was nine, drew our family at school, and in the drawing I was a small figure in the corner holding a rectangle. The teacher asked him what the rectangle was. He said it was my phone, and that it was how you could tell it was me. He did not mean anything by it. Children are just accurate.
I had been treating the first hour as working capital. It was the principal.
I have not become a different person. I am careful here, because the clean redemption arc is exactly the kind of story my industry sells and I no longer trust it. I still like the work. I still catch myself pricing things that should not be priced. But I protect the first hour now with the same seriousness I once gave a board meeting. No phone until the kettle is on. I stand at the back window while it boils and watch the yard go from grey to colour. It takes about four minutes.
The cost of the pace was not burnout. I was braced for burnout. The cost was that I was mostly not there for the parts of my life that do not produce a deliverable, which on inspection were the parts that were the life. Nobody sends you an invoice for that. It comes out of a different account, quietly, and you read the balance years later, when a nine-year-old hands you the statement.