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Work on what matters.

10 Sept 2020

We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled by many things beyond work: supporting your family, children, exercise, being a mentor and a mentee, hobbies, and so the list goes on. This is the sign of a rich life, but one side-effect is that time to do your work will become increasingly scarce as you get deeper into your career.

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  • increasingly senior roles require that you accomplish more and more, and do it in less and less time
  • at some point you’re going to run out of things that are both high-impact and easy. This leaves you with a choice between shifting right to hard and high-impact or shifting down to easy and low-impact. The latter choice–easy and low-impact–is what Walk refers to as snacking.
  • It’s ok to spend some of your time on snacks to keep yourself motivated between bigger accomplishments, but you have to keep yourself honest about how much time you’re spending on high-impact work versus low-impact work.
  • Preening is doing low-impact, high-visibility work. Many companies conflate high-visibility and high-impact so strongly that they can’t distinguish between preening and impact, which is why it’s not uncommon to see some companies’ senior-most engineers spend the majority of their time doing work of dubious value but that is frequently recognized in company meetings.
  • Sometimes you’ll find work that’s worthy of attention, but which an organization is incapable of paying attention to, usually because its leadership doesn’t value that work. In some companies this is developer tooling work, in others it’s inclusion work, and in most companies it’s glue work.
  • Teaching a company to value something it doesn’t care about is considerably the hardest sort of work you can do, and it often fails, so you should do as little of it as you can, but no less. As a senior leader, you have an ethical obligation that goes beyond maximizing your company-perceived impact, but it’s important to recognize what you’re up against and time your efforts accordingly.
  • much more important is the sort of work that simply won’t happen if you don’t do it.
  • This work is an intersection of what you’re exceptionally good at and what you genuinely care about.
  • If you spend your career snacking, preening or chasing ghosts, it’s possible but relatively unlikely that what you’ve done before will be valued at companies you interview with. Instead, the only viable long-term bet on your career is to do work that matters, work that develops you, and to steer towards companies that value genuine expertise.

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In summary, sustaining a successful career as time becomes scarcer requires prioritizing high-leverage work that only you can do—such as editing critical projects or fostering team growth—while actively resisting the traps of \"snacking\" on easy tasks, \"preening\" for false visibility, and \"chasing ghosts\" by misapplying past experiences.

  • Avoid low-value patterns: Resist \"snacking\" (low-impact/easy work), \"preening\" (high-visibility/low-impact work), and \"chasing ghosts\" (misguided shifts based on ego or irrelevant past contexts).
  • Prioritize with context: Swarm existential risks immediately; for non-existential issues, seek areas with room to grow where you can make rapid progress rather than competing in overcrowded priorities.
  • Leverage seniority through editing and finishing: Use your relationships and experience to make small changes that shift outcomes significantly, and coach others to finish projects, turning risk into leverage.
  • Invest in team growth: Dedicate time to mentoring and onboarding; this is underinvested yet highly leveraged work that defines a lasting legacy beyond individual output.
  • Pursue unique impact: Focus on work at the intersection of your exceptional skills and genuine care that simply won't happen if you don't do it, ensuring long-term career value.

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