Will It Matter?

It was 2am and I was awake over a sentence.

Not a restructure. Not a redundancy conversation. Not a client walking away or a bill I wasn’t sure how to pay. A sentence. One line in an email I’d sent that afternoon that I had suddenly decided sounded short, or cold, or somehow not quite me — and I was lying there in the dark rewriting it, over and over, like a woman doing laps in a pool with no end.

I lost three hours of sleep to that sentence. The next morning I got a reply. It said: Sounds great, thanks Sonia. Three hours. For sounds great, thanks Sonia.

And here’s the part that actually stopped me — I have done that my whole life. I have given entire nights to things that were, objectively, nothing. And I have given entire nights to things that were everything too, and I couldn’t always tell you which was which at the time. That’s the bit that gets me. Not that I was worried. That I worried indiscriminately.

So I started asking myself a question. And it has quietly rearranged how I lead, how I sleep, and how I spend the one genuinely finite resource I have. The question:

Will this matter in five years?

Will it matter in five months?

Will it matter in five days?

Then why are you giving it five minutes?

That’s it. Four lines. No app, no journal, no morning routine, no $400 course.

I ask it out loud sometimes, in the car, like a slightly unhinged woman. I ask it before I fire off the reply I’ll regret. I ask it when someone has been short with me in a meeting and I can feel my brain starting to build a case. I ask it when I’m circling something at 2am.

And most of the time — most of the time — the honest answer to the first three is no, no, and absolutely not.

Why this actually works (and it’s not just a nice line)

I love a good quote as much as the next person, but I’m not interested in something that only sounds good on a mug. So here’s what the research says, because this one has legs.

Psychologists call it temporal distancing — deliberately stepping back and looking at a stressor from a distant-future vantage point instead of standing inside it.

Emma Bruehlman-Senecal and Özlem Ayduk ran seven studies on it, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2015 under a title I adore: “This Too Shall Pass.” They found that taking a distant-future perspective on a recent stressor reduced emotional distress compared with a near-future perspective or no perspective shift at all. And they identified why it works — not because you talk yourself out of the feeling, but because your attention shifts to the impermanent nature of the thing. You stop treating a bad Tuesday as a permanent condition.

Their follow-up work in 2016 went further. People who habitually take the long view don’t just feel better in the moment. They show lower stress reactivity and greater overall well-being. It’s not a one-off trick. It’s a muscle.

And then there’s my favourite study of the lot. In 2019, Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman at Penn State had people record their worries in real time and then check back later to see what had actually happened.

91.4% of the worry predictions did not come true.

The most common individual score? One hundred per cent. Not a single worry materialised.

LaFreniere said something about this that I have not been able to shake: worry makes you miserable now in order to prevent a misery that mostly never arrives. Read that again, and then think about how many of your last ten sleepless nights were spent pre-paying for a disaster that never showed up.

But, and this is the important bit,

I need to be really clear about something, because this question gets misused.

This is not permission to stop caring.

The five questions are not a shrug. It is not “nothing matters, let it go, live, laugh, love.” I have seen leaders use exactly this kind of framing to avoid the hard conversation, dodge the accountability, and wave away the person who was genuinely hurt. It won’t matter in five years. Yes, it will, mate. It’ll matter to them for a decade.

The question cuts both ways. That’s the whole point. Because sometimes you run it and the answer comes back: yes.

Yes, this will matter in five years. The way I handle this redundancy will matter in five years — to that person and to every person watching how I do it. The feedback I keep not giving will matter in five years, because she’ll still be making the same mistake and wondering why she didn’t get the promotion. The culture I’m tolerating will matter in five years. My daughter will remember whether I was actually present or just physically in the room.

And when the answer is yes — you don’t give it five minutes.

You give it everything. That’s the trade. The question isn’t designed to make you care less. It’s designed to stop you from spending your care on the wrong things, so you have some left for the right ones.

What does this look like in real leadership

Here’s the sorting I do now, and I’d invite you to try it this week.

It doesn’t matter in five days

• The typo in the deck.

• The tone of someone’s Slack message.

• The meeting that ran ten minutes over.

• The person who didn’t say good morning.

• The LinkedIn post that got eleven likes.

• Whether they think you’re too much.

Matters in five years

• The person on your team who’s quietly drowning and hasn’t told you.

• The standard you let slide six months ago is now just how things are done.

• The conversation you keep rescheduling.

• Whether the people who work for you leave stronger than they arrived.

Notice something? The first list is mostly about how you’re being perceived. The second list is mostly about other people.

That’s not a coincidence. Almost everything that steals our five minutes is ego wearing a very convincing costume.

How to actually use it

1. Catch the loop. You’ll know it by the feel — the same thought, circling, going nowhere. That’s not thinking. That’s rumination wearing thinking’s jacket. Name it out loud: I’m looping.

2. Run the four lines. Out loud if you can. Five years, five months, five days. Don’t rush past them — actually answer each one. The distance is doing the work.

3. Act on the answer. If it’s not across the board, you close the tab. Physically get up, move, change rooms, do something with your hands. If it’s yes — you put it in the calendar this week, and you do the hard thing. No answer gets to be “keep worrying about it.”

That’s the discipline. You don’t get to run the question and then keep the worry anyway because it’s familiar.

The thing I want you to take from this

You will not get the three hours back. Neither will I. But you have a finite number of five minutes left, and right now a genuinely alarming percentage of them are being spent on things that will not exist in a week — while the things that will still be echoing in five years sit patiently in your calendar, rescheduled, waiting for a version of you with more capacity.

There is no version of you with more capacity coming.

There’s just this one, making choices about where the five minutes go.

So — will it matter? And if it won’t, love, why on earth are you still holding it?

This article was originally published on Sonia McDonald's LinkedIn.