The week before last, I was sitting in a small, hot room at the hospital again for one of my girls’ CF clinics. One of the girls was losing her shit, the other was getting weighed so my wife was trying to get a nappy on while a physio waited to start their assessment, so naturally she was also losing her shit. Standard chaos.
My phone made a notification noise… it was an email from the NHS Trust, the response to the formal complaint I filed about my mum's care. Over six months I'd been waiting for this. Six months of chasing, of reliving the worst weeks of my life every time I opened the email thread. And here it was, sitting in my inbox, while my daughter screamed and a consultant knocked on the door.
I didn't open it then.
Then my phone rang and kept buzzing. A potential client I'm speaking to currently that I would love for us to work with… a big retainer opportunity for NOVOS. The kind of call you don't miss. The kind that would change the shape of a quarter for us.
I stared at the screen, my daughter in one arm, the consultant walking in, the phone ringing, the email waiting.
I let it ring.
Here's what nobody tells you about being stretched across multiple lives: it's not the time that kills you, it's the energy.
I have the same 24 hours as everyone else. I can manage a calendar, I can block time, I can prioritise tasks. That's not the hard part.
The hard part is that a six-page apology & NHS complaint response alongside a CF clinic appointment alongside a new business call don't just take time, they take completely different kinds of energy. One needs you to be emotionally present, one needs you to be forensic and angry & one needs you to be sharp, commercial, optimistic.
And when all three land in the same hour, no amount of time management saves you. You have to choose where your energy goes and that choice is the real skill nobody talks about.
I called the lead back two hours later. Apologised, explained I was at a hospital appointment, they understood. The conversation went well & the opportunity is still alive & very close to sign-off.
I opened the Trust's response that evening, after the girls were in bed. Six freaking pages. An apology for the care my mum received. Acknowledgment that things went wrong, communication failures, delayed treatment, a system that let her down in her final weeks. They're sorry. They've made changes apparently.
Six months of waiting, and the answer is: “yes, we failed, and we're sorry… but also it was mainly just circumstantials failures rather than process failures”.
I sat with that for a while. Then I closed the laptop and went to bed. Because I had to leave at 6.30 in the morning to get to the office and two girls who'd be up at 5.
The thing about energy is that it's not renewable in the way productivity culture tells you it is.
You can't meditate your way out of grief. You can't cold-plunge away the weight of fighting an NHS Trust while raising twins with a chronic condition while scaling a business. These aren't problems you optimise, they're just loads you carry, so all those things someone tells you to do are BS when the stakes are this real.
What I'm learning, and I'm still learning it, is that energy management isn't about having more energy. It's about being honest about where it's going.
Last week, my energy went to my daughters in that clinic room, which to me was the right call. The lead could wait. The complaint could wait. The girls couldn't.
But I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel the pull. The guilt of watching that phone ring and not answering… the founder voice in my head saying you can't afford to miss that call. The grief voice saying open the email, you've waited six months. And the dad voice, the quietest one, saying just be here.
The takeaway:
If you're carrying more than one heavy thing right now, which let’s be real, most ambitious people are, then stop pretending it's a time problem. It's an energy problem. And the only way through it is deciding, in real time, which version of yourself the moment needs.
You'll get it wrong sometimes. I do. But the act of choosing deliberately instead of reacting on autopilot is the difference between performing and surviving.
Last week I chose to be a dad in the clinic, a founder in the afternoon, and a grieving son in the evening. Not all at once but one at a time.
That's the best I've got right now… and I’d like to think it might be enough.
See you next Wednesday.
— Antonio
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