Anyone who can wreck your whole day with one text owns way too much of your stock.

One message lands and the next nine hours belong to it. You reread it, you draft replies, you are absent at dinner and short with people who did nothing. Whatever they meant, the effect is wildly out of proportion to the sentence, and the reason is usually that this particular person has been given an unusual amount of room.

When it happens, put a gap between the text and your answer, even an hour. Do the next thing on your list first. Then look at whether they hold that much sway because of who they are now, or because of something that was true a long time ago.