Non-Negotiables List
Identify and protect the 3–5 practices that keep you standing — so they don’t disappear the moment things get hard.
You’ve built practices that genuinely work. But then pressure builds. A big deadline hits. A crisis happens. And suddenly those practices are the first things you cut. Your progress resets. You’re back where you started. You need to protect these practices like the foundation they are — not as luxury items you abandon under pressure.
The Micro-practice: You’ll list your most powerful practices, choose 3–5 to protect no matter what, write down why they matter, and tell someone who’ll hold you accountable.
How:
- List the practices that have actually made the most difference to your capacity — across all domains. Write them all down.
- From that list, choose 3–5 that you will protect, even during your busiest, hardest weeks. Not everything. Just the ones that matter most.
- For each one, write: what it is, when you do it, and what happens when you skip it. Be specific. “If I skip this, I feel scattered and reactive by Friday” is way more powerful than “I need to do it.”
- Tell someone about your non-negotiables. A partner, a close friend, a colleague. Someone who can gently remind you when you’re about to abandon them. Accountability makes a difference.
- When pressure builds and you’re tempted to skip, ask yourself: “If I drop this for the next week, what’s the real cost to my capacity?” The answer is almost always: more than the time I’d save by cutting it.
Time: 15 minutes to create the list, ongoing to protect it.
When: After you’ve built your capacity system. Review it quarterly, especially after high-demand periods.
Why this works: Capacity doesn’t stay strong by accident. When demands increase, recovery practices are typically the first casualties — which creates a vicious cycle where increased demands meet decreased capacity, making everything harder. Leaders who maintained their capacity were the ones who made visible commitments to their renewal practices and held them even under pressure. Non-negotiables aren’t rigid dogma or inflexibility — they’re structural. They’re the foundation that keeps everything else standing. When you protect them, you actually create more capacity, not less. You’re not being selfish — you’re being strategic about what keeps you able to show up for the people and work that matter.