Dealing with finite time and energy

Why 100% capacity is risky

It’s been a while since my last post.

Not that I haven’t been writing. Just that my my daily writing time has been mostly consumed by the SharpestMinds Newsletter. (Go subscribe!)

This was a conscious decision. A big theme for me this year is recognizing my finite capacity and embracing the inevitable trade-offs. This means being ruthless about how I spend my time. I can’t do everything I want to do (this was the topic of a previous post).

Writing daily is important to me. But I only have finite time and energy. I don’t have the capacity to keep a regular personal newsletter AND maintain the company newsletter.

Given that SharpestMinds is one of the most important things in my life right now, I’ve prioritized writing for the company over my personal blog. I’ll still find time to write here—hey, I’m doing it right now. It just won’t be as frequent as past Russ hoped. Past Russ had unrealistic expectations about my writing capacity. One post a week, Russ? What were you thinking??

In general, this way of thinking—recognizing my finite capacity—has been paying off quite well. It forces actual prioritization. I can only have a few projects on my plate at any time. So they better be the most important ones!

But I’ve noticed some failure modes. Limiting the projects on my plate generally leads to quicker progress on those projects. This feels good. And it can lead to overconfidence—I’m killing it with my current workload. I’m sure I can handle more! Adding one more thing to the plate, even if it’s small, can end up being the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The other failure mode is when unplanned, urgent tasks arise. This happened the other month at SharpestMinds. A vendor of ours, quite suddenly, announced they were shutting down. This put a whole pile of work on my plate that couldn’t be ignored. And it happened at a time when I had very little slack in my schedule.

I flirted with burnout here. But, luckily, I recognized my burnout signals—I become more irritable and more prone to distraction and rash decisions. I could put some projects on hold until this new fire could be put out.

Lessons learned: ruthlessly prune the projects on my plate and always keep some slack in my schedule to deal with unplanned work.

Now, back to building.
-Russell