I’ve been realizing more and more lately how important it is to pay attention to the leverage of actions that you chosoe to spend time on. As I’m finding that I have more ideas to explore and initiatives to push forward and visions to realize than I have time, I’m figuring out how to prioritize the tasks that maximize the impact to time/effort input ratio.
A big step forward was becoming comfortable with handing projects off and trusting others to take them on. I have this OCD-like gripe around handing off things that I know exactly how it should be done, and this week has been a good reset and test for training my ability to successfully onboard others and explore other higher leverage ways for me to contribute. I haven’t been coding too much in the past few days for work because there’s a product writeuyp, design review, and future-looking efforts that have felt more pressing to me. Before I worried that because my core competency and “job title” is engineering, it wouldn’t make sense if I wasn’t actually contributing to execution (whether coding or designing a new project, etc.), and I’m slowly becoming more comfortable with trusting my gut for where my time is best spent to push the team forward.
I’m curious to explore how to more quickly judge projects and ideas for their potential impact and alignment with my core values and how to quickly identify the highest leverage items and how many of those are needed for demonstrating the core of the idea before reaching diminishing returns of time invested.
For now, I’m listening intently to my natural sense of fun and play. I’m choosing to optimize where I’ll have fun and naturally have boundless energy to direct my time, with a little nudge towards what feels to be higher leverage (I think I naturally tend to think those are more fun too given that they are underinvested areas).
This is the 77th installment in my experiment of publishing raw, lightly edited mini-essays every day towards achieving 100 public pieces. Check out the rationale and the full list here.