The fastest way to find out who's taking from your life is to run out of personal capacity.

A message pops up and your jaw tightens. Someone asks for five minutes and it feels like they're asking for fifty. A name appears on your screen, and before you even answer, you're calculating how much energy the conversation is going to cost.

You haven't picked up the phone yet, and you're already tired.

Capacity has a way of exposing things. People who never seemed demanding suddenly feel expensive, and requests that once felt small begin pulling from an account that is already overdrawn.

You notice how many relationships survive on access. How many people have become accustomed to your availability. How many conversations continue simply because you never stopped saying yes.

You also notice how differently certain names land. Some are the people you're avoiding at 2pm, while others are the people you'd answer at midnight without thinking twice.

I've experienced versions of this more times than I can count.

During the first year of our second business, I was getting more than 300 messages a day. And by the end of most days, it felt like my attention had been fed through a wood chipper.

There were times I'd chuck my phone into the trunk of my car and slam it shut. All I wanted was 45 minutes of uninterrupted silence, and it felt like if I got one more notification, I was going to wrap my car around a power pole.

During that season, I realized I was giving everyone the same level of access.

The person who'd been in my life for fifteen years and the person who slid into my DMs last Tuesday were getting the same version of me.

Once I realized that daydreaming about a month-long stay in the hospital to catch a break wasn't a great stress management strategy…

I started looking at relationship proximity through the lens of trekking a mountain. 

At the top is the summit. Below that is basecamp. Then there are checkpoints as you make your way down, and finally, the parking lot.

The summit is reserved for a very small group of people. The ones closest to you. The ones you'd answer at midnight without thinking twice. The people who get the best of you — not what's left of you.

Below that is basecamp. Close friends, family, the mentor you call when you're stuck. People you trust deeply, even if you don't talk every day.

Then come the checkpoints — and not everyone at a checkpoint is at the same one.

The highest checkpoint might be the old friend you only talk to a few times a year but would drop everything for in a crisis. 

Below that, the coworker you genuinely like, the friend you see at the gym, the person you always end up in a good conversation with. 

Lower down might be the neighbor you wave to, the parent you make small talk with at drop-off, the person you'd stop and chat with but wouldn't think about after you walked away.

And then there's the parking lot.

This is where the person who made your life hell in high school slides into your DMs. A friend of a friend wants to grab coffee to pick your brain. Or some person you met once at a conference somehow has your number.

Where someone sits on the mountain should determine the level of priority and access they have to you. And we get ourselves into trouble when we give summit-level access to people standing in the parking lot, while the people at the summit get whatever time and energy happens to be left over.

Most people know this intuitively. They just never give themselves permission to act on it.

There's something else worth naming — not everybody stays in the same place forever. Some move up the mountain, others move down. Relationships deepen, fade, shift, and sometimes disappear completely.

The mountain isn't a one-time decision. It's a personal inventory.

Who is at the summit? Who is at basecamp? Who is sitting at a checkpoint? Who is still standing in the parking lot?

More importantly — does the level of access you're giving people match where they actually stand?

Most people already know who's at their summit. The problem is their calendar often tells a different story.

The mountain isn't about deciding who matters. It's about whether your decisions reflect it.