On Deleveraged Time – should everything always be amplified?

All time does not feel equal. Productivty at any cost: whose time are you living on? Impact is one helluva drug.

My last job as an employee was essentially sorting through a perceivibly infinite stack of interesting and challenging problems, and picking whichever I liked most.

Once a problem was tackled acceptably, I had the luxury of being allowed to easily move to the next one, with an understanding that the goal was to work on whatever was most important at an organisational level.

Exploring

This involved lots of exploration, meaning time spent on things that would lead to nowhere: learning was anothter name for that game, and it would pay off from time to time¹, with some teams picking up the work when it was worth it.

The nicest part was that I wasn’t limited to a single team, system or technology: while I could not touch everything I was certainly allowed to look at anything I wanted, and had sufficient clout to at least not be shooed away.

Stuff wasn’t shipped everyday, but whenever it did, it either landed in a new product, improved an existing one in a major way or made building things faster for others.

A recruiter put it this way:

“So you were having impact."

And immediately followd up with:

“Is that what you seek in your next job?"

I guess so. But it’s a hell of a drug. And when you realise you’re addicted to something, surely it’s fine to ask yourself a few things?

The lure of Impact

While this wasn’t the original goal, leaving my job for a break of an undefined length kickstarted a deeper (re-)discovery process: looking back, it seems to me that I’ve re-learned or re-wired my relationship to time itself.

Upon leaving, it took me months to be comfortable with the fact that whatever I was spending time on was suddently way less leveraged.

There was no way I could affect or impact as many people as quickly as before: no performance improvement I could implement, no design or code review that would simplify things drastically, no build-system update that would make everyone twice as fast.

Suddently, impact was way, way less valid as a reason to do things, because most of my options had so little of it.

This meant reflecting on and (re-)discovering purpose.

Navalisms or weird truisms?

There’s quite a few Navalisms around leveraging your time, often through software and technology, and it’s easy to derive deep injunctions to productivity from these, such as:

If you’re not 10x’ing an important metric WTF are you even doing?

As the weeks passed by, shipping no code² and earning no to little money, I was slowly falling back into a more linearized time, not entirely knowing how to feel about it.

But time spent with loved ones, family, kids or sick parents can’t be amplified. You can’t 10x the impact of the time spent with your grand-dad in the last months of his life, or the time spent with your parents when they suffer life-threatening conditions, or the time spent with kids.

And I believe these things are important: so time amplification can’t be the only thing to optimise for in life.

Productivity bedrock

There’s this productivty bedrock, where things are either done or they are not, and where the only way to obtain more is to actually do more.

And if you mess up, you’re not just losing this year’s bonus, but possibly sleeping in wet clothes and losing your already limited food supply.

My re-learning of time culminated with a two week trip into the wilderness where every single moment was, in essence, deleveraged.

It is worth it to live such moments: for the search for impact isn’t pure upside.