By Traciana Graves

Photo by Roberta Sant’Anna

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

Anne Lamott

Opening Notes

You optimize everything except the system running the optimization.

This isn’t about wellness trends or work-life balance. This is about recognizing that your most critical infrastructure—you—operates without the maintenance protocols you’d demand for any other essential system.

-Traciana

The Blind Spot

You’ve built systems that scale, teams that perform, and strategies that execute flawlessly under pressure. Yet the primary asset in your portfolio runs on caffeine, adrenaline, and the fiction that “catching up on sleep later” is a viable maintenance strategy.

40% of people say they rarely make time for themselves each day.- Kelton Global & Birchbox research

This isn’t an oversight. It’s a systematic undervaluation of your core resource.

You wouldn’t run mission-critical software without regular updates, backups, or monitoring. Stop running yourself without them.

Six Non-Negotiable Maintenance Tasks

Think of these as your daily system checks—the minimum required to keep your primary infrastructure operational:

Hydration: Half your body weight in ounces. Dehydration decreases cognitive performance by 12%. You wouldn’t accept that productivity loss anywhere else.

Sleep: Seven hours minimum. Sleep debt compounds like financial debt, with similar consequences for performance and decision-making.

Nutrition: Five servings of fruits/vegetables daily. Your brain burns 400-500 calories daily. Fuel it like the high-performance engine it is.

Recovery: Twenty minutes of stillness without digital input. Downtime isn’t lost time—it’s when your brain consolidates information and generates insights.

Joy: Daily laughter. Chronic stress literally shrinks the prefrontal cortex. Laughter reverses this damage.

Recognition: Acknowledge one thing you executed well today. You track KPIs for everything else. Track this one too.

Your Predictable Objections

“I don’t have time.” Translation: You haven’t calculated the cost of running suboptimal systems. The time you lose to poor decision-making, decreased creativity, and recovery from burnout far exceeds the investment in daily maintenance.

“I perform fine without this.” You’re comparing yourself to your depleted baseline, not your actual potential. That’s like saying a car runs fine on three cylinders because you’ve forgotten what four feels like.

“I’ll prioritize this when things calm down.” Things don’t calm down for people like you. Systems either maintain themselves proactively or break down reactively. Choose your timing.

Implementation

Week 1: Baseline measurement. Track these six metrics without changing behavior. Document energy levels, decision quality, and cognitive performance.

Week 2: Implement one protocol. Choose the easiest win—usually hydration or sleep.

Week 3: Add a second protocol. Monitor compound effects.

Continue until all six are operational. Treat failures as data points, not character flaws.

This is project management applied to your most important project: sustainable high performance.

The Bottom Line

Your capacity determines your impact. Your maintenance determines your capacity. Everything else is downstream.

You already know this. The question is whether you’ll apply what you know to the system that matters most.

Stop being the leader who optimizes everything except their ability to lead.

The world needs your best work. Your best work requires your best system. Your best system requires maintenance. Act accordingly.