Every action you take (or don’t) has an opportunity cost, and sometimes it’s super easy to overlook them because the choice may not even feel like a “choice.”

It’s vital to, of course, consider opportunity costs when working. One is always running the calculus on things like “If we pick this tech stack, we will need a this amount of ramp time before features go out” or “If I spend the time mentoring this junior member of the team, I can’t knock out as many stories this week.” Weighing these against the results of the choices is just part of the job.

But it’s also important to calculate the opportunity cost of factors impacting the galaxy of your life surrounding your work as well. That analysis could range from things like “If I have this conversation at work, it may limit my ability to advance at this firm” to “If I spend these extra hours working, it may impact my relationship with my family.” It’s easy to overlook these choices because they don’t always have a deterministic, discrete result to measure against, and negative results can creep in without you even noticing.

I’m sharing this because it’s approaching the holidays, and every holiday season I have to live with the fact that I gravely miscalculated an opportunity cost that resulted in something I can never fix. I was working on a big, very visible project at a big, very visible company. I had been working on it solo for months (not my choice), and it was going slowly because I was working in a new tech stack with poor documentation and a small ecosystem (somewhat my choice but not really). It was supposed to launch in the Fall, but it wasn’t ready yet. It kept slipping until it wasn’t going to launch until after Christmas, but that was likely only to happen if I worked over our Christmas break to get it done.

I hadn’t seen my family in a long time (I think maybe I’d missed the previous holiday season with them for various reasons), but I had been promising to get home to see them this year. With this project hanging over my head, I told them I’d have to miss holidays again, but I’d make it home as soon as I could, at least before my grandmother’s birthday in May. I just really had to get this done and out, or it just felt like it was never going to get done. I didn’t really consider any other option because it just seemed like this was what had to happen. I was blinded by the seeming inevitability and/or banality to any opposing consequence that I may have needed to consider. My manager directly asked me to work over the holiday break to ship it, so obviously I needed to. I’d just knock this out, go see my family with some PTO later, and all would be good.

Well, my grandmother didn’t make it that far.

My grandmother who helped raise me, who was like a second mom to me, had a sudden stroke and died before I could make it home again. Even typing this right now is a little overwhelming, so I won’t dwell on the emotions that evoked. I’ve worked through them, I’ve accepted it, but it still hurts. Honestly, the worst part is that project never launched. I did finish it, but no one was working then to deploy it because they took their PTO. And then when they returned, all these new requirements came into existence that were never previously communicated, so it just got shelved. So, I gave up a lot of badly needed PTO, missed seeing my grandmother one last time, and essentially ended up in a state of serious psychological distress for…nothing. That was not a well considered choice.

But these things have soft edges. They leave a lot to factors that are often out of your control. I don’t beat myself up over it, but if I could do it again, I would 100% have chosen differently. All I’m asking is to be sure to take a deep look at your situation to make sure that you’re not making what seems like an easy or obvious choice (or acting on things that may not even seem like a choice!) simply because you aren’t considering that there may be wider consequences to it.