Time Management

About this Episode

On this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike opens with military surgeons as his model for triage, doctors who decide fast and accept ugly outcomes because the only goal that matters is getting the patient home. He uses that to introduce time management, and Will immediately splits the problem in two, since a downed server and a rough quarter call for very different responses. In a real emergency Will cuts off limbs to save the body. He kills the API that is taking the server down, flags off the broken subsystem, or pulls a bad release, and he describes a feature flag as a tourniquet that stops the bleeding without killing the patient. Mobile complicates this because a shipped version cannot be clawed back, so the circuit breakers have to exist before anything catches fire. Kyle pushes on the harder case, which is triage when one boss wants revenue, another wants the release, and another wants one customer happy. Vivian answers with mass-casualty triage, where hospitals categorize patients by tag and pre-decide who gets treated, and Kyle counters that his problem is everything arriving tagged as immediate.

That leads to the episode's core argument, which Matt states plainly: priority is singular, and juggling several at once means none of them get done well. Will adds that ranking the queue is a manager's first job, so a manager who cannot rank has already lost the plot and left the engineer to figure out which failure will cause the least grief. He admits he keeps a second thread going anyway, because the first one gets blocked waiting on another team. The panel gets specific about human throughput. Will puts a good work block at roughly two hours, task-switching cost at thirty minutes, and realistic coding time at about six hours a day. Vivian objects that productive hours vary by person and by life stage, citing her own 1:00 to 4:00 a.m. window in high school, while Will argues that a schedule nobody else shares collapses the moment you need to coordinate. Mike admits to twelve to fifteen meetings a day and triaging which of four stacked invitations to attend. Matt estimates that eighty percent of meetings could be eliminated, and the group agrees a meeting should be small and should end with a decision or an action item. On decision-making itself, Mike points to the psychological cost and to fear of being punished for a wrong call, which pushes teams into paralysis. Matt's position is that a decision beats no decision, and Will's tactic is to make the call himself, email his boss, and keep receipts.

The last stretch turns to sustainability. Vivian argues that leaders have to avoid putting people in positions where every option causes damage, and she uses competitive swimming as her example, where teammates blew out their shoulders training twenty-five hours a week instead of the twenty they could sustain. Companies want twenty-year employees to stay another twenty, so breaking people the way a military breaks soldiers does not pay off. Mike compares it to parenting, where rule by beatings works at first and then works less and less, while respect and clear consequences take longer and actually hold. He notes that his own boss makes a point of leaving at 4:30 so the team sees what a normal day looks like, and stays late only when the situation genuinely calls for it. Mike closes with his personal system, which is early morning quiet time before the day fills up, often on a bike ride, where he picks the few critical items and launches them first so they can move through other people while his calendar takes over. Vivian gives the line the episode lands on when she asks whether the first priority should be prioritization, and Mike agrees.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I am Mike, and I am hosting again today. With me, I've got Vivian Moore, Will Archer, Kyle Archer. We've got Eddy Lopez and Ramses Bateman.

And I'm going to start off today by talking about military surgeons. I've not served in the military, but I've read about this. You can imagine that, in the military, particularly, you know, in, like, active warfare, there are a lot of injuries. And they've got to set, you know, a whole medical establishment within the military.

The striking thing that I've read about...and, again, I haven't served there myself, so I'm speaking secondhand or thirdhand, having read about it. The military surgeons are incredibly pragmatic. That is, if somebody comes in and they're badly injured, they don't think about the plastic surgery this person might have to get later. They think, "I need to save this person's life. I want this person to walk away." And, you know, if they've got to remove the leg, they're going to remove that leg, you know, whatever it is they've got to do. I'm not going to go into the details because it's graphic [chuckles]. But, you know, they have to be exceptionally pragmatic about what they do.

In general, they're not being sentimental. They're saying, you know, "What can I do to save this person's life? Everything else is secondary. How do I keep this person moving along?" And so, that's what they do. And they've got to deal with all the gruesome details of it.

But because they are so concerned about making those decisions, making them early, making them immediately, right, and having one priority: how do I keep this person alive? How do I get this person, you know, home? They save lives. They make all the difference between that person going home and not going home. And those are tough choices. But if you think about the end goal, they're making the right ones. They've made the choice there that they're not going to get caught up in the stress of the moment because they care about saving somebody's life.

We're building software. We're not on a battlefield. Hopefully, you're not on a battlefield. There may be some people out here, you know, building software for the battlefield. That does happen. But most of us are doing stuff that's much more mundane. But there's some lessons that we can learn there [chuckles], lessons we can learn about prioritization.

So, I gave that intro because today we're going to be talking about time management. And if you're like me, there is...And, I think, like most people, there's more to do than you can do. There's always more to do than you can do, and sometimes it's just a complete torrent. There is such a constant stream of stuff coming in that you can't even think about it.

You can't even think about prioritizing because it's just...it's just a flood. And that is a hard situation to deal with, right? It is an endless challenge. We were talking a little bit in the pre-call about how we all deal with this, and I certainly do. So, we're going to talk about that today because I think that it's something that we can all grow from.

So, I'm going to start with thinking about these military surgeons as the kickoff point and their pragmatic prioritization with a solitary goal in mind, because I think that's a great place to kick this off. And rather than add anything else myself, because I've been talking for a few minutes now, where would you all like to run with that?

WILL: Well, I just want to...I want to narrow this down to, like, are we talking about an emergent situation where the server is down and you need to fix the server right now? How do you do it? Or are we talking about, like, a rough sprint or a rough quarter? Because they're different.

MIKE: Ah, they are different. And I think that's a critical distinction. I was thinking about that again ahead of time myself, because it's different rules, right? Going back to the military triage, there's some situations where if you don't act now, then you don't get a chance, and there's other situations that can wait a little bit. And in any emergency room anywhere, they make those decisions all day, right? They do the triage, and that's why you go, and you sit, and you wait for three hours in the emergency room. Again, I haven't had much experience in the emergency room, luckily, but I know that's -–

EDDY: I'm trying to equate, like, how you're mapping that to, like, engineering, right? So, are you saying, like, someone is on their deathbed; they need priority. Is that equivalent to a software engineer saying, "Oh, the house is on fire. We're no longer...Our server's not up. That takes precedence"?

MIKE: It does. So, server's down, server's down. You're bleeding money, right? Your lifeblood is that revenue coming in, and if you're down, then you're not doing business. Depending on the size of your business, you might be losing millions of dollars a minute, you know? That is a direct threat to your livelihood. And the tech debt you have that makes everything really slow, yeah, that's important, but it'll be the same way tomorrow.

WILL: It's true. Well, I mean, like, in those situations, like, really what you're trying to do, like, I, think, you know, like, I am much like a civil war surgeon. I'm lopping off limbs. I'm applying tourniquets. I'm applying, like, real, like, macro carpet bombing type solutions. Like, oh, this API is taking the server down? Not anymore. Like, we're just not going to, you know, we're not going to run leases, or we're not going to do...Whatever it happens to be. Oh, this SKU is crashing with 500s, and it's taking all that stuff down? Like, what SKU? I've never heard of that. We don't sell it. We're done [laughter], you know?

And I will do those things, you know, like I will cut off a limb to save the body. Those are the sort of actions that I'm immediately looking to take. Like, is there a feature flag? Can I feature flag this off? Can I turn this gateway off, you know what I mean? This subsystem, can I turn it off? I'm turning things off, you know?

It's like, oh, did we push a version? Well, we're not pushing that version no more. That version [laughter] goes away now. Like, 11.9? It sounds like an 11.81 day to me. Boom. Just because I mostly work in mobile apps these days, you can't just claw back a version. You don't just stop that on a dime like you do if you're operating a web app.

So, you have to have built out, like, the sort of, like, fail-safes and circuit breakers and feature flags and stuff like that, so you could turn off features. But you had to build that first, because, God help you, if you release a version of your mobile app that gets a person in a crash loop, where, like, they open the app up and it crashes before they can do anything, like, that's spectacularly bad. And you have to get that off people's phones with the help of an ultra mega giga corporation that may not prioritize your users or the existence of your company in a way that you do.

EDDY: So, like, what's the feature flag for a surgeon, you know, who's –-

WILL: Tourniquet. Like, I think of a feature flag like a tourniquet, right? It's still there, but the blood is not pumping through this thing and, like, leaking out, spraying out all over the ground, right? We're going to tie that off, you know, it hasn't died yet, but, you know, it's no longer receiving and leaking blood, you know? And that sucks, and it's highly hazardous because, like, one API rarely exists in a vacuum, you know. You can start seeing them job queues start to pile up [laughter].

KYLE: So, in the medical world, I feel like it's easy enough to say, like, you can triage based upon, like, the specific need, like, dead or alive, right? I do feel, like, how do you triage when you almost have to have several variables? And in that, I mean, one boss is worried about money; one boss is worried about new releases; one boss is worried about a specific customer being happy, right? How do you then triage your entire workload when you're adherent to several bosses, several categories, I guess?

VIVIAN: I'll throw my two cents into this. To keep the kind of medical field analogy, I feel like that more equates to the process of being a surgeon when, for example, like, a natural disaster happens. And you've got 400 people that are all showing up to the hospital. 10 of them will die in a minute, 50 of them will die in an hour. And the rest of them may need immediate medical treatment, may not survive the week without immediate medical treatment, so on and so forth. That's a multi, like, stage trying to prioritize. You might let someone die because you know that trying to save them, although you probably could save them, might cost the lives of three other people.

And so, that kind of process of figuring out where to prioritize, I mean, at least from my experience and what I know about the medical field, they literally have specific rules in place. They categorize different people with different tags. Like, they have, like, a black tag, like, that person is going to die. And then they go from there to basically have a system of prioritization from that perspective. Like, they literally just have to categorize every single risk into a simple system that allows them to make more informed decisions from there. And they've kind of pre-made those decisions.

KYLE: Right. But how do you handle it when everything you're getting has been tagged as immediate?

EDDY: Well, you basically say, "Oh, you have a broken leg? You know, you can be in a wheelchair. It's fine [laughs]. You know, you can get around. It's not a big deal."

WILL: If everything's a priority, nothing's a priority.

MIKE: That's --

WILL: Ultimately, like, if you have a supervisor, if you have a boss at some level, and if your boss is not able to rank, you know, your current task list in order, right, from 1 2, 3, 4, 5, to however many numbers you need, if they can't rank those tasks, your boss is not doing their job. And, at that point, what you're triaging is, you know, like, a dysfunctional chain of command.

Because if you were in charge of delegating tasks, assigning job queues to your engineers, and you don't know what the priority of anything is, this is, like, your literal first job, like your first job. And so, if they've broken down, right, you know, then you're...I don't know, man. I mean, like, who's more important, and what's more urgent? And, like, you know, then you're sort of, like, managing systemic collapse really, and that's an art, not a science, really. I don't know if I can, you know...

MIKE: No, I think you nailed something, Will, and I don't know that I had even thought about this before. I recently got a new boss, and he's really good. And I can tell you exactly what my priorities are right now, and that's what I think makes him really good. There have been times where it seemed like the priority shifted day to day [chuckles]. I've definitely been in those priority-shifting environments.

Right now, for the last month, I know exactly what my number one priority is. And after this meeting, you know, after the podcast, I'm going to go into a meeting to work on that number one priority, even though it's late Friday afternoon, because that is the number one priority. And it's important to the company, so that is number one.

And number two, eh, I think I probably know what number two and number three are, and that helps a ton. That helps tremendously. And I don't know that I'd thought about it in quite that context before. It sounds like one of the most important things that the...you said it was job number one. Yeah, one of the most important things that the leadership can do is tell you, "This is what the priorities really are." And that's hard, because that requires making a choice.

You know, all of these medical analogies we're making, these are awful choices. Like, Vivian was talking about the black tag, like saying, you know, "I'm not going to help this person." Nobody wants to do that. It's gut-wrenching. But if you don't do it, worse things will happen. You've got to make that choice.

You've got to make those hard choices, because if you don't, worse things will happen. There's no escaping the consequences, so get out ahead of it and make choices that lead to less bad ones.

MATT: One of the issues is, people use the word priorities, plural, when really it's priority. You can only have one. So, you take care of your priority, and then something else becomes that priority. If you try and juggle all of them at once, usually, none of them will get done well. So, it's all about focus and priority.

EDDY: On the individual contributor, though, right? I don't know if that necessarily makes sense as a company, right? Like, I think, company-wide, you have to be able to juggle priorities, right?

MATT: All of them will roll up into a single priority.

WILL: Like, gosh, man, you know, like, I agree wholeheartedly, like, on the realm of an individual contributor, like, I can really...I don't know. I mean, like, I actually like to have two because of, like, the sort of latencies around, like, I like to have two things cooking because of latency. Like, I like to have two threads. I don't like to have three threads, and I get really grumpy with four threads. But, like, I really like to have two, because I will be waiting. Like, I'll get blocked. So, I mean, really what I want is, I want one priority, like, this is my thing. And then I want a back burner that I can work on, like, while the main priority is, like, blocked for some reason. That way, I'm just always cooking. I mean --

MATT: Sure. Most of us work that way, right? But there's always something that's the most important.

WILL: Yeah, I know.

MIKE: If something comes up, the other gets pushed away.

WILL: I mean, and, like, and I want to say, like, okay, well, like, I'm an engineering manager, right, or I'm a director, right? I'm a manager, and I've got 10 devs. I should be able to have 10 priorities: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And I will assign them, you know, based on suitability, you know, to my 10 developers, and I have 10 priorities. And that sounds, you know, that sounds plausible, right? The reasoning is clear. That doesn't work [chuckles].

MIKE: It does not work at all.

MATT: Right. Well, because your priority isn't those 10 priorities. Your priority would be delivery, right?

MIKE: That's right. Those are the projects.

MATT: And each of those engineers would have a priority, which is one of those 10.

VIVIAN: I just love bringing it back to the analogies, especially the computer analogies. This is just, like, how a computer system is designed. Every single, like, core on a CPU can only execute one task at a time. But you can do 30 different things on a single thread just because it's designed just to shift priorities really, really, really quickly.

And the more things that you're trying to do, the faster you have to be able to switch priorities. But at the end of the day, at any given moment, you only have one priority. You may be dispatching a hundred different tasks to all of the cores on your GPU, but each time you're dispatching a task, your priority is dispatching that task. Like, I don't know –-

EDDY: Computers can --

MATT: And which one of those tasks is going to perform better if you're running a single task on multiple threads or multiple tasks on a single thread?

EDDY: Okay. But that's only possible and realistic if you're running on a computer, right? Realistically, right, your brain is not wired to multitask to that degree, right? So--

WILL: Yeah. The rule of thumb --

MATT: No, I'm strongly against multitasking.

WILL: Like, how much parallelism can a dev handle, right? A dev's ideal work block is about two hours, and their task-switching cost is about 30 minutes. And, like, their maximum programming dev time throughput is 6 hours. And, like, you know, work around that math. I mean, like, you know, different people are different, but they're not an order of magnitude different. Like, that's basically it: two-hour blocks, half-hour context switch time. I think after three hours, most devs sort of, they need, like, a meeting they can zone out in or a snack or something, you know? And, I mean, like, exceptional people, but, like, don't make your plans around exceptional people. Make your plans around, like, just normal humans doing their best.

MIKE: That's why the Pomodoro time is an hour, right?

WILL: The Pomodoro time is 25 minutes, but that doesn't work for anyone.

MIKE: Is it 25?

WILL: It just doesn't. Like, 25 minutes, you're just kicking in. You're just kicking in.

MIKE: Yeah. But, like, you say, order of magnitude. I actually agree with your time ranges. I think they're about dead on. Couple hours, 30 minutes time to switch to the new task.

WILL: Give me a two-hour block, you know? I have never seen a company dedicate ever, on any level, for anyone, ever, like, a block of, like, "Just don't **** with the devs in this block of time. Just let them do something [laughter]."

MIKE: We have, at times, tried to carve out some time, and, you know, some specific time for that, with mixed results. But there's an attempt. Particularly, you know, here at Acima, we've attempted to do that. And, I think, for the most part, individual contributors are getting some time, well, quite a bit of time in the afternoons. Looking at the individual contributors here, does that seem about right? Do you get some time in the afternoons? I'm seeing Kyle say, "No. No way [laughs]." Eddy, maybe? Eh, maybe [laughs].

VIVIAN: I mean, I can say, as an intern, that I get a decent amount of time in the afternoons.

WILL: Guys, come on, man. We're just meat robots. We're just sad meat robots [laughter]. Like, this sad brain juice we're squeezing out, like, trying to make magic happen in our brains. Like, don't give them the time in the afternoon after you, like, beat them down with, like, four hours of...It's like, okay. Run free. Make magic. Come on [laughter]. That is awful.

VIVIAN: Okay. But I do want to push back on this. I think part of the challenge of, like, having a dedicated time for engineers to do their work is that every single person that I've talked to ever in my life is functionally productive at varying hours throughout the day. When I was in high school, my most productive hours were from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m., whereas in college, that shifted to much earlier in the morning, because I had actually woken up that time. And it has changed since to now, and it's kind of variable depending on the day.

So, as much as I would like to be able to dedicate, I have three hours here; I'm going to do three hours' worth of work, on some days, I can do six hours' worth of work in that three hours, and on other days, I can do maybe an hour. So, I would love to say, "Let's dedicate a set amount of time every single day, or, like, three times a week to just working," and I bet my body would, and my mind would accommodate that and get used to that. But I just don't know if, especially, engineers can have the dedicated consistency to that for that to be as effective as just them finding the time within the time and giving them the flexibility to orchestrate their time enough to know when they will be effective.

WILL: I have worked a lot of jobs where I could work just exactly how I wanted to work. Like, my optimal programming schedule, like, the best programming, like, I've ever done, best work I've ever done in my life, like, I'd wake up at around 10:00. I'd roll into work around noon. I'd work for about 10 hours; my boys and I would hit the bar, because we all worked together. We'd close it out. We'd drink till 1:00. I'd be asleep at, like, 2:00. And I would do that six days a week, and that was the best for me at the time. And, like, having, you know, also had the experience of working at adult jobs [laughter].

I mean also, like, having kids, you know what I mean, that are going to wake me up at the crack of dawn seven days a week, no matter what. Like, you need to bend yourself to the needs of the team. I just don't think...Like, if your vibe is from, like, 1:00 to 4:00, right, which is, like, I feel you. I feel you. However, it's just not going to work, you know what I mean?

Like, it won't work because, like, I mean, ultimately, in the end, right, like, I talk about, like, these sort of, like...Like, I always like to have two threads going, because my thread will get blocked constantly, right? I'll get blocked because I'll be like, "What even is going on with this API?" And then I got to get the API team in, and then they have to tell me the answer to my question so they can build around the API. Or I need to, like, get a server spun up, and I need to get the DevOps team to spin me a server up or something, something somewhere, somehow. If it's from 1:00 to 4:00, then I'm...the first time I need to coordinate with somebody else, I'm sunk. And so, I mean, if you want to exist in a society, you know, and not just be, like, a lone wolf cowboy, you got to [inaudible 21:29]

MIKE: I'll tell you my constraints. I average somewhere around, somewhere between, like, 12 and 15 meetings a day. I tell you, there is not much time in between there to do other things. I have very little control of those gaps.

WILL: Can I ask, I mean, like, I feel like that's an organizational anti-pattern. Like, 12 to 15 meetings, like, even if it's, like, a half hour, you know what I mean?

MIKE: Well, some of mine don't go to...So, and this actually goes to...So, I have to do triage on those meetings because sometimes there will be a stack three or four deep. And so, I look at those four meetings and say, "Okay, which one do I attend?" And, you know, there's other ones that'd be good for me to attend to, and I just don't. I'll send an apology, say, like, "Sorry, I can't make it this time."

I have to carefully manage my time, or I will get nothing done. There'll be, you know, nothing but meetings morning to night every day. And they'll expand beyond the boundaries of the workday until there's just nothing but meetings 24/7.

MATT: Yeah, that's part of the position. So, you know, as you move up in an enterprise, that's what happens. And that's also why my most productive hours are, like, 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. That's when I get things done. My days --

EDDY: You also don't sleep, Matt.

MATT: Yeah, this is true [laughter]. But I spend my day meeting planning those types of things and organizing. And then if I want to produce, that happens, like, 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. And then I start my day at about, you know, 6:00 a.m. the next day usually, and that's just how it goes.

WILL: Oh, you got to be geeked out on peptides 24/7, man. This is, like, because I'm old, okay? Like, I'm old. I remember the before times [chuckles]. I remember the before times. I remember them very well. And, like, this kind of meeting didn't happen, because you had to have a conference room, and there were only so many conference rooms. And you couldn't screw around. And there were only so many seats in the conference room. There were only 10 chairs at that table, you know?

But I find myself, I'm perpetually pulled into these 40-person meetings. And, like, a 40-person meeting where the presenter is just screwing around, freestyling, a 40-person meeting, and that's a lecture. You are giving a lecture in a lecture hall, and a big one, like, a big one, and, like, I don't know. We have meeting cancer. Like, people need to make some decisions on their own. Like, and the fact that we have this unlimited meeting bandwidth allegedly, you'll find these sort of, like, serially abused decision makers --

EDDY: So, this is going on a tangent, right? But, like –-

WILL: Didn't used to do it.

MATT: Well, you hit a key point. You said decision-makers. Generally, meetings like that, there are no decisions, and they are a waste of spend.

WILL: Massive.

MATT: You know, they cost the company massive amounts of money, and you generally gain nothing out of it. And I would say probably about 80% of the meetings people have can be eliminated.

But the problem also is, especially if you're in a big enterprise and you are working across the world, that feedback loop has to be tight, and communication has to be there, and that's a hard problem to solve.

EDDY: So, if you want decisions to be made in a meeting, you have to grossly reduce the number of attendees in a meeting, right? So, I think the first step is really, who really needs to be there? And find the optimal amount of individuals that need to be there, right? If you can't do that, I feel like meetings are wasted.

MIKE: Well, and that meeting better be organized around making a decision as well.

MATT: That's right.

MIKE: If there's a meeting that's not organized around making...okay, well, there can be a couple purposes. You better be walking out of there with a decision, or you better be sharing some important information that you're not going to be able to easily share any other way, because you can probably get to that in an email.

MATT: And, usually, meetings --

WILL: Yeah. I mean, honestly, if it's information sharing, it should be a video, or an email, or a Confluence page. A meeting is the absolute dumbest way to do that because maybe I'm going to forget. I'm going to forget. I'm going to sit in front of you. I will take notes, and I will forget everything you've said to me [chuckles].

MATT: Well, generally, meetings can happen with a couple of people who are going to be decision makers. And if you don't leave with action items, that meeting was completely worthless. And then you share your information with your team, whether it be an email, during a standup, whatever. But to make meetings effective, they need to be extremely small groups. And if you're not participating and adding value, you should get up and walk out or hang up, just not be present- because it's a waste of your time and the company's money.

WILL: Absolutely. But, I mean, I guess here's the question that I've got, right? Because I've never been, like, a manager of managers. I've never done it, right? Like, everything has been, like, very, like, first party. Like, I said I was going to do it, or I said you were going to do it, and, like, and I'm not making promises on promises.

Like, why can't the managers, like, why can't managers just represent their team? They know because their boss has communicated their priorities, right? And they have access to the Kanban, like, hopefully, and, like, what all my people, all my direct reports, are working on right now, and, like, what my priorities are. And, like, why does it have to be you?

Like, I understand, you know, like, sometimes, there's conflicting priorities where, like, my 1, 2, 3 are your 6, 7, 8, and one of us is going to have to change, right? Like, my team and your team, we are going to have to align, right? And daddy's going to have to, like, sort it out, you know what I mean? Like, my understanding of what I need to do, you know what I mean?. And I'm just going to be like, "Mike, Mike"

MIKE: Yeah [laughs].

WILL: I'm not being mean, but, like, what is it? Okay. Somebody is going to have to shuffle their deck. Who is it? And you got to tell me, because I don't want to hear your mouth [laughter] when things didn't get done. But, like, well, why can't the managers just do it? Just do it.

Because I've run into this thing over and over and over where there's this sort of, like, this square root, right, of people who can make decisions and make things happen, and there's not always even a charge. There's a lady, I won't name her, but, like, H.K., and, like, if you message H.K., she's not, like, a big boss; she just runs things. And if you message her, you might not get the answer you want. It's like going to the Oracle. The Oracle's going to tell you [laughter] the truth, not necessarily the truth you wanted, but, like, the truth you're getting. If you go to her, it's going to get settled.

MIKE: I think a lot of people, well, maybe, in general, there is a psychological cost to decision-making, like, measurable. They can say that, yeah, you can, like, have people make a bunch of small decisions, and it's harder to make a big one, because every decision takes something out of you. And unless you cultivate that, unless you grow that and are willing to do that, or, you know, have encouragement to make those choices...We've talked about psychological safety before.

If you feel like I'm going to be punished for the wrong consequence of my choice, then you're going to put off that choice. And if you have that systemically, which is, I think, the default, then you have a whole bunch of decisions not getting made until they have to. Because people are only going to make those decisions that they absolutely have to make, because they're going to minimize that work. They're going to minimize that cost, that risk, because any decision I make is something I have to be accountable for. And so, I think --

MATT: And that's okay. Accountability is good, right? And, I think, early on in my career, I felt that way, that I was afraid to make the decisions, because if I made the wrong one, I'd be punished or chastised in some way for it. These days, I'm a very different person. You know, those of you who work with me know I have no problem making a decision. And, I think, the idea is: make a decision, because some decision is better than no decision. Learn quickly and pivot quickly. It's okay to fail. It's okay to make the wrong decision. And the way you improve and move forward is by correcting those wrong decisions quickly.

MIKE: Well, institutionally, there's a huge cost to not making those decisions. And so, I think what you're saying is exactly right, Matt, but that has to be encouraged, actively encouraged. And if you don't have strong leadership that's actively encouraging people to make decisions, and leading by example, making decisions, encouraging people to make decisions, then it tends to rot. And that's a really bad situation. You know, everything just falls into stagnation. Nothing gets done. It's awful.

WILL: Like, as a little worker bee, like, my tactic has always been, like...because I frequently get pulled into these sort of, like, tug of war things, right, where I'll just make my own damn decision. Like, I'll just be like, "Okay, listen, this is what I'm doing." Boom, boom, boom. I send an email to my boss, and then when it all comes down, like, it's like, I've got it in writing. I told you what I was going to do. There it is. And, man, even when you're faced with systemic dysfunction, just clear communication and some gentle keeping of receipts [laughs] will go a long way.

MIKE: And that proactiveness, being willing to make those decisions in an organization that has any semblance of health, is actually going to make you float to the top. Because people need somebody who's going to get something done. And I've very rarely seen somebody kicked out for being decisive. There's foolhardy, and that's different [laughs]. Being decisive means considering the options, you know, saying, "Oh, these are the pros and cons. I'm going to make a decision." It's not, "Hey, I'm not going to pay attention to any of the consequences. Let's just go."

So, I'm not talking about the, you know, let's just take needless risks. But looking at the options, making a choice, and running with it, that's how you get things done. And most leaders, even dysfunctional leaders, are going to see the team members who are actually getting things done, and they're going to appreciate it.

WILL: Yeah. And if you tell me, like, "No, it's not A, B, C; it's D, E, F," then it's like, "Okay. All right." Somebody just needed –-

MATT: Then we'll make an adjustment.

WILL: Yeah. Somebody just needed to tell me what letter was on top. Let's go.

MATT: That's one of the things I really like about my teams is they do make decisions, and they're autonomous. Because I am not a fan of micromanagement, by any means. If I have people on my team, my expectation is trust, and that they're going to do the job that they set out to do and get it done. If not, then I probably have the wrong team, and that's on me, right? Because I'm the one who builds the team. I'm the one who runs the team.

But I think I've learned a lot from you, Mike, and you bring up psychological safety. And back when I used to report to you, that was it. You trusted me, allowed me to make decisions. We got things done, and here we are, you know? Both of us have stepped up in our careers. And I think a lot of it has to do with that, just being able to make those decisions and get things accomplished. If you're spinning wheels all the time, then what are you doing?

WILL: Well, I'm kind of curious, right, like, flipping it on the head. Because I was thinking about...I was thinking through this thing. You know, and, like, Mike emailed me the thing earlier today. And I was thinking about, like, sort of, like, you know, like, your sort of, like, classical leadership breakdown, right, where, like, you have too many conflicting priorities. And somebody will say, like, "Everything's first priority."

And so, it's just like, okay, you know, you've given up the game, right? Like, I was like, okay, all right, my manager's lost the plot. And now I need to do their job and figure out what, at the end of the ride, is going to give me the least amount of grief, which is unfair and nearly inevitable over the course of your career, that you're going to be forced to do that, you know what I mean?

Like, it's just a heuristic, right, where I always think about these things, and it's like, you know, a manager needs to set priorities. Well, what about the other side of the coin, where, you know, you're the manager, and you're the leader, right? And you're just like, "Hey, the house is on fire. You need to work harder," you know. Because we've been there, right?

Like, I am by the lake watching people water-ski in front of me literally right now. I hope the mic isn't picking it up. But, like, last week, the roof was on fire, and I saw the wrong end of midnight every day, because things just needed to go out because of reasons. And I needed to make sure that, like, you know, like, I wasn't letting my team down while I was going on this vacation that had been scheduled for several months [laughs], you know?

And, like, we can all talk about, like, we can all talk about, like, sort of, like, you know, like, do a good job as a manager. Do a good job setting priorities and managing bandwidth. And it's stuff like that, which is, you know, conventional wisdom. But, like, what about just, like, boots in asses? Because that has to happen too. Everything that has ever been made has been born in blood and sweat and tears. There's no exception.

MIKE: So, think about a parent. There are parents who try to maintain order with beatings. And there are those that go about it in a different way, with strong, you know, enforcement of consequences without violence or disrespect, but rather, you know, "These are the requirements, and those can be consequences to your actions. I'm going to give you some freedom, so you're going to experience some of those negative ones sometimes," right? And help build them. And a constant development of respect, so when you say, "This is important," they actually listen to you.

So, you can go down the first route, and it kind of works at first, and it becomes decreasingly effective over time. The second route, it takes time, but it leads to long-term healthy children and [laughs] you know, and mechanics that actually work. And I think the same thing applies to adult relationships if...Well, sure, you're going to be in situations that are bad. You say, "The server's on fire. Go do this." And if that person's not going to go do that, well, that's a person problem [chuckles]. They should...maybe that person shouldn't be on your team. Maybe they're having a bad day.

So, I mean, there's exceptions, but, you know, you deal with that. But you get there by communicating those priorities. Most people want to do the right thing. If you're not there saying, "Hey, the server's on fire. This is what you should be doing," then you're neglecting your duties. I mean, then it's on you.

You're right. You need to be out there saying...and sometimes it's, "Hey, if we don't get this out, it's going to be bad. Sorry. Can y'all put in a late night tonight [chuckles]?" And you lead by example, and you do it yourself, then you can make it happen, as long as it's a time-limited experience and not continuous, because then you're in a permanent emergency. And was it really an emergency to begin with?

VIVIAN: I mean, I love just going back to examples, and analogies, and so on. But just thinking about the prioritization, one, yes, you have to kind of gentle-parent, at least in my experience, almost everyone you work with. Because as much as we like to think that we are adults who can always control our actions and the outcomes of our actions and our choices, we control the choices that we make, but there are things that are out of our control. Sometimes you've been working on an emergency for a month straight, and you're burned out. And as much as you think you can continue to work, your brain is telling you that you can't.

And so, at least in my opinion as an intern, as someone with tons of experience, it is, like, kind of the job of a leader to make sure that each person is not being forced into situations that make them make decisions that hurt something no matter what. Because everyone is going to have to make those decisions, but at the end of the day, you shouldn't be needing to...well, either I'm going to continue to burn out, and it's going to hurt the company, because it's going to burn me out even worse, and it's going to take me a month to recover. Or I take the break now, and it hurts the company, because I need two weeks to recover. Like, that shouldn't ever be a case that occurs, but that requires forethought. That requires specifically choosing people.

Like, it's a hard problem to solve, and it's not as simple as, like, prioritizing which task to work on. It's prioritizing: do I take the loss now of this engineer that needs a vacation terribly bad, or do I not let them go on vacation because we're still trying to get prod up and working as best we can, but then we're going to need them gone for, like, two months after? I don't know.

I think about, like, the cases of the best militaries in history. They don't function the best because the leaders will beat the soldiers down the best. Like, the commander beating a soldier will only work to a certain extent. And, at the end of the day, that soldier will not fight as hard as a soldier who is dedicated and believes in their cause. But a soldier only believes in the cause and is willing to fight for a leader if that soldier has had experience with a leader who is, one, willing to stick up for them. Two, that soldier knows that the leader is, like, also committed to the cause, and that you don't need to die month after month, year after year, and constantly throw yourself onto the battlefield.

WILL: I mean, I will say this, right? Like, the military's going to mess you up. They're going to mess you up like a car wreck [laughter] real good. They're going to mess you up just for practice. Just for practice, like, real good. Real, real, real good.

MATT: Mess you up for practice, yes. Think about sports, for instance. You practice hundreds of hours for a couple hours of the actual game time, right? And it's preparedness. But, again, I agree with what Vivian was saying, in that you're going to get way more out of someone who you have flexibility with, who can take the time they need.

Those hours that we were talking about earlier of productivity are going to be way more productive with someone who's healthy mentally and physically and can actually put focus into that time. And if you get burned out, you can't put that focus in, and you're not effective. So, someone who puts in three hours of really effective time, likely, if they're the same skill level, is going to be way more effective than someone putting in 40 hours of time if they're extremely burnt out.

MIKE: So, the manager has to then not just take into account business priorities, but the effective leader has to care about more than just that priority list. They have to pay attention to the world around them, know the people, get in there. And that's hard work.

WILL: I mean, because, like, I believe really strongly in sustainability. I believe strongly in the sustainability of an organization. But I've also, like, done the best work that I could possibly do, right? Like, I've achieved that. It's just not like that. It's weird and obsessive and, like, over...you're overexposed and, like, overworked and, like, freaked out, and, like, you know what I mean?

Like, 100% is, like, so much further than most people, you know, imagine. If you haven't been there, it's just a freaky, weird, feverish, bordering-on-insanity sort of experience. And, like, on one hand, I'm like, "You can't live there. You will literally go insane." But it's cool to get there. It's cool to taste it every once in a while. But it's also, like, sort of, like, why would you do that writing business software?

MIKE: [laughs] But it's true.

WILL: I want to get to this, like, feverish state, like, you know, optimizing our lease workflow algorithm by 20 basis points.

MIKE: But it comes down to where we started, though, which is, there are some things that are more important than others. If you're sitting in Ukraine right now, for example, you may be writing software that has life-and-death consequences.

WILL: Yeah. Like, go nuts, you know?

MIKE: But most of us are not. Most of us are not. And that sustainability matters, and that's part of your prioritization.

You mentioned before having a good boss. You said that he gets off...He makes a point of people seeing him leave the office at 4:30 because he wants to set a standard that, on the average day, we should be done on time. Now, there's been some craziness lately that meant that he's probably been around for a lot longer than that. So, he's also leading by being there when there's the exceptional circumstance. And then when that's over, I expect him to be leaving the office with everybody seeing him at 4:30 again. Because you have to say, "Yes, we're building business software. Yes, it's important, but this doesn't work if we don't set boundaries."

VIVIAN: Matt, I love the sports analogy that you brought up, because, I mean, like, you were saying, you could potentially train 60 hours a week, breaking your body right to the limit, doing everything you possibly can, and you will not win the competition at the end of the day. No matter what sport it is, that is not going to be sustainable. It will not work. Our bodies and our minds, are a part of our bodies, need time to recover.

Like we were talking about at the beginning, like, an engineer only has maybe a three-hour block, probably a two-hour block, where they are, like, really locked in and able to focus. And they need 15, 30 minutes of break time in between to kind of recharge, get a snack, get some food, get 200 more milligrams of caffeine. And, like, over the long term, if you want to be a successful athlete, you can't push your body right up to the breaking point every single time, because then you'd get injured.

I mean, I was a competitive swimmer in high school, and even in high school, the number of times that people would have shoulder injuries because they tried to swim for 25 hours a week at full tilt, rather than, like, the 20 that they could really reasonably sustain, was remarkable.

And especially in a corporation, where you want the people that have been there for 20 years already to be able to work for your company another 20 years, because they have all the institutional knowledge, know how your systems work, and can be the most effective engineers and leaders, I feel like it doesn't make sense to take a military approach of breaking your soldiers. Because soldiers retire after 20, 25 years, unless they become a general and need to stop being on the front lines and being broken. People will not sustain that level of destruction for as long as we want to hold people in the company.

MATT: Yeah. Well, and, in most cases, you don't have to perform when your life's on the line, right, and bullets and bombs are flying past your head, and you fear for your life. That's why the military does what they do, and that isn't sustainable in most aspects of life for sure.

WILL: Well, I mean, like, the military's just a different animal. Like, they get you plenty of downtime, too, but it's a wholly...I don't know. It's weird to, like, analogize business to the military, because they're just way, way different animals. But, you know, I don't know, I always like the sports analogy because, like, we're just meat robots, man. Like, you could sprain your brain exactly like you sprain your ankle. Like, you think you can't, but you absolutely can. It's just harder to think about.

MIKE: I've done a lot of teaching, and sometimes, you're not going to learn anything. Like, there's that time that it's not going to work. Doesn't matter how much you want that information to go in there; it's not going to work, and you've got to work around those constraints. The brain is not infinite. It's got its limits.

WILL: Absolutely.

MIKE: So, we've talked a lot about prioritization. We've talked about limits. We've talked about making chunks of time.

One thing we haven't really talked about is, one thing I try to do is, I reserve some of that time before work, you know, early morning, because that's my quiet time I get when I actually get a moment to think. And I will say, "Okay, what are the things I need to do today?" And if I can get those things done, and I usually try to start my day with those, and they're usually critical things. If I don't get these things done, the bad things happen, right [chuckles]? I launch those at the beginning of my day.

And those gaps between meetings, or sometimes in meetings when there's a dead spot, I am following those things through. So, hopefully, by the end of the day, or maybe the next day, those things I've set in motion are going to happen. And I think that's one of the most important things that we can do is related to that prioritization. That day's going to get out of control, and some things are going to get out of hand. And those 5 meetings you had at the beginning of the day might turn into 10.

But if you get those critical things rolling and get those things through, maybe you only get three things done, but they were the three most important. For me, that's one of the most critical things I think I can do is starting off with, loosely...and, of course, I prioritize. Sometimes it's not perfectly prioritized, but, you know, I've got this pool of things that I need to get launched, and I launch with those. And they'll go through a process, you know, people will get back to their messages and [chuckles], you know, people will respond. They'll go talk to somebody else. By the end of the day, usually, I've got some answers, right? And I've pushed things forward a little bit.

All the prioritization in the world doesn't help if you don't have the time in the day to work on it. So, I think you need to take those moments when you do have some time, whether it's early morning or some quiet time, to get that list and get that going, because then, at least, something gets done that day.

VIVIAN: So, are you suggesting that your first priority should be prioritization?

MIKE: Yeah, absolutely [chuckles].

VIVIAN: Okay. So, this is just...I'm curious; I don't know if we have the time for everything, but for people that have a lot of tasks on their plate, a lot of meetings, have a lot less time to spend time prioritizing, what are the systems that you use to do that prioritization efficiently? Like, do you have a clear to-do list of things with, like, labels, or do you have it all in your head? How do you manage these systems that all need to be running at once?

MIKE: I totally have a to-do list. I also use my message tools, you know, say, Teams, Slack, email, you name it, that I have messages unread that I manage. So, I know I can go to these. But honestly, I try to take some quiet time every morning. Went on a bike ride this morning early and cleared my head, because [chuckles] without it, my mind was just, you know, there was too much stuff. And I came home and I, like, "Okay, I know these are the things I need to get done," and that's exactly what I launched into when I started my day.

WILL: I'm really curious, like, because you're in Chicago, right? So, you're Central Time. So, you're an hour ahead. Even with Texas, an hour ahead of Mountain, right, like, what does your typical day, like, calendar-wise, look like? I'm really kind of curious. This is truly prurient interest.

MIKE: Yeah. So, I aligned, years ago, my calendar to roughly correspond to Mountain Time. So, if you look at my workday, in Central Time, it's 9:30 to 5:30 or so, more or less.

I start my day, so this is kind of outside the bounds of that, but I generally start my day real early. 5:00.

WILL: 5:00?

MIKE: Yeah. Usually.

WILL: 5:00...okay. So, like, you wake up at 5:00 o'clock. Bike ride, kids, like, whatever. So, you've got, like, four and a half hours before, like, work starts.

MIKE: That's right.

WILL: Okay. And then, like, 9:30 to 5:30. Those are pretty, like...are those hours, like, broadly consistent?

MIKE: Yeah.

WILL: Yeah? Like, cool. All right. All right. And then, like, 5:30, and then, like, what do you do? What do you do to recover? Like, what's your wind-down look like?

MIKE: [chuckles] I've got three young kids at home, so my wind-down is usually make dinner, take the kids where they need to go, mow the lawn, go, go, go. And then fall asleep next to one of my kids by putting them [chuckles] to sleep in bed and then wake up the next morning. And so, for me, that early morning time is my only real quiet time, where I actually have that time to regroup.

WILL: Interesting. Okay.

VIVIAN: It just seems that every single person, like, no matter how busy they are, needs at least, like, a couple of hours of just being on their own to let their thoughts clear and to think about things, like, no matter what. Like I said, mine in high school was, like, 1:00 to 4:00 a.m. Yours is 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. No matter what, like, it seems like a fundamental human need just to have some alone time, like, almost every single day.

WILL: Yeah. Like, you got to have a certain amount of time off. And, like, I've found that, like, if I don't have a certain amount of, like, just decompress time, I'll steal sleep to get it, and that's not good.

MIKE: No.

WILL: I try really hard for 7:00. It's usually more like 6:00, but, like, you don't want to go under 6:00. Don't go under 6:00. Don't do it. You're not going to be good.

MIKE: Well, I think that's a...We're in a good spot to tie this up. Because we've talked, you know, we've ended with, as you said, Vivian, I think your first priority needs to be prioritization. Take that time. Make that the priority, so that you can actually start filtering these days. That gives you at least some control because otherwise, you have none. And you're not going to be in control of it, and it's going to be in control of you, and it's not going to end well.

Lots of rich material here. We could probably go into aspects of this again sometime. Thanks, everybody. This was great.

Until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.