The past year I’ve been working on a book. I organized my entire life to carve out and preserve my Saturdays for this project. It is finally done (almost! Just reviews of proof pages to go); I got my weekends back just in time to work them through the review cycle, and with the worst of that done… I had the first weekend that felt open in a really long time. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to weekend, and I’ll need to figure out how to weekend again.
When I took my current job, it felt like a bit of a step down in some ways – far fewer people, far less to do. But nearly four years later, I’m responsible for an order of magnitude more people than I was at the beginning, my directs are almost all of them directors themselves. In a distributed context, it’s easy to lose sight of what that means. I try to make myself available. I reach out to new people, I hold office hours every week. But I don’t think these things go that far. I pinged a bunch of ICs as part of the review cycle and was struck by how rarely I interact with them. It’s no longer part of my job to be in the standard day to day work that’s going fine – somebody else is doing that now. I’m more elsewhere – where the problem are, working on something further out, or elsewhere in the broader engineering org.
I have always been something who thought critically about time, and considered what was a good use of time, and what was a bad one. Always wanted to maximize the time I had. These two things together – the book and the increase in scope at the day job – concurrently, meant I’ve spent the past year or 18 months feeling the most time poor I ever have. It has made me the most ruthless I have ever been about how I spend my time. It has been so acutely clear to me that any minute that is wasted, is a minute that is taken from either my personal life, or some decent, competent person who it is my responsibility to help.
There’s a cost to that, of course; I think about the Heidi/Howard case study popularized in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and how much a factor of that is “he’s busy; she’s a bitch”. But there’s also a clarity and an efficiency that I’m really grateful for. I have been more clear about what is worth my time and what is not. I have had better boundaries, had an easier time saying no. I have been less overwhelmed. I have overthought things less. I have got more done than I would have thought possible.
Coming out of writing the book, I feel like I’ve been doing a bit of an apology tour to all the people in my life who I have neglected. I’m determined to use at least some of this space to be a better friend, be more present in the communities that I’m part of. The rest of it, I don’t know. I am thinking about how I can keep the good – the clarity, the focus – but reclaim a little more spaciousness, and a little more chill. And I’m trying to remember the things I used to do before. How to weekend. How to linger. How to write about something just because it’s on my mind – as opposed to committed to in an outline. How to decide what I want – as opposed to need – to do.