“The audience only pays attention as long as you know where you are going.”
Philip Crosby
It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip: visiting London that summer, staying in cheap hotels, and mixing leisurely enjoying the city while also trying to make the most of every moment. The sun was still up around 9 p.m., slightly disorienting as it felt more like late afternoon
As we entered the tube station, I heard a busker playing in the distance. First the unmistakeable intro, followed by the iconic opening lyrics : “Today is gonna be the day…” In retrospect, hearing one of the biggest songs by one of the biggest British bands in the world, Oasis’ Wonderwall, seems like a natural choice for buskers literally in a tube station. I could feel that moment would linger in my mind forever.
We tossed in a few coins and kept walking. After we passed, he went quiet for a few seconds, and then he started again.
I assumed he would continue the song, but he did not. He replayed the opening a second time!
At first I thought maybe he had made a mistake and just wanted to give it another go. Then, while we were waiting for the tube, we heard him restart and play the opening again. This time, we laughed because we had a suspicion that he knew what he was doing.
His audience was not sitting in a theater.
They were tourists walking through a station, carrying bags, watching signs, looking for the right platform, trying not to miss the next train. Most had only a few seconds to notice him, and in those few seconds, the part of the song everyone knew was the part that mattered.
He was giving people what they wanted.
He was giving people what they wanted.
If people had stopped to listen, maybe the right thing would have been to play the whole song. But for people passing by, the best version of the work was short, familiar, and timed to the situation.
I think about that busker more often than I would have expected.
Partly because it was funny. Partly because it was a tiny bit brilliant. He was not trying to prove he knew the whole song. He was not asking the room to become something it was not. He noticed the moment he was in and played the part that would actually reach people.
In a few seconds, you recognized the hook, you recognized the lyrics, dropped your coins in his case – and enjoyed those few moments on your way to the next part of your travels. And after you had passed, it would be time for a new group of people to hear the same thing, and have their own moment.
I wrote this years ago as a small travel story, but I think about it now most often in engineering leadership.
There are times when I want to give the whole explanation: the context, the constraints, the tradeoffs, the history of how we got here, and why the obvious answer is not actually obvious. Sometimes that is exactly what the moment needs. If the group is deep in the work and trying to make the right call, the details matter.
But if the goal is alignment, the moment may need something different. People may need the decision, the risk, the cost of waiting, the tradeoff, and the ask. A project update, a planning conversation, a business case, or a hard change in direction can fail not because the reasoning was weak, but because the useful part never became clear enough for the room to act on.
That does not mean dumbing it down. It means respecting the room you are in. Sometimes communication is not complete when I have said everything I know. It is complete when the other person has what they need for the decision in front of them.
“Time is the coin of your life.
It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.
Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”
– Carl Sandburg
Each week, I put money aside for savings, investments, bills, and the other things I know I need to take care of before I spend the rest.
If there is not enough for everything, I cut back somewhere. Maybe I spend less on something nice but unnecessary. Maybe I wait on a purchase. But the important part is that I do not wait until the end and hope there is something left.
I pay myself first.
I have not always treated my time that way.
For a long time, I would wake up and start spending the day on whatever was already waiting for me. Client work. Email. A project. A favor for a friend. Something that felt useful, responsible, and easy to justify.
Only after those things were handled would I try to make room for my own goals.
In theory, that sounded fine. I had scheduled time for myself later. I had a plan. But then the work would pile up, or the day would run long, or I would finally get to the evening and feel too drained to do the thing I said mattered to me.
Some days I would make it to my goals. Plenty of days I would not.
That bothered me, because I was not neglecting random things. I was neglecting things I said were important: exercise, reading, reflection, personal projects, and the quiet work of becoming the kind of person I wanted to become.
The uncomfortable pattern was that other people’s priorities got my best energy, and my own priorities got whatever was left.
I do not mean that in a resentful way. Work matters. Commitments matter. Being useful to other people matters. I am not trying to build a life where I only do what I feel like doing.
But there is a difference between serving real commitments and letting the day decide for me. If I always started with whatever was most urgent, easiest to answer, or most visible to someone else, I should not have been surprised when my own goals kept moving to tomorrow.
So I started experimenting with a simple change: I moved some of the things that mattered to me earlier in the day.
Not everything. Not some heroic three-hour morning routine. Just enough to stop treating my own life as something I would get to after the real work was done.
For me, mornings became the easiest place to protect that time.
The house is quieter. Fewer people are asking for things. I have not yet opened the door to email, messages, news, and the small emergencies that can make a day feel already claimed.
So I use that time for the things I am most likely to lose later. I work out. I read. Some days I practice guitar. Some days I reflect, or work on a personal project before the rest of the world has had a chance to pull my attention somewhere else.
The point is not that everyone needs to wake up early. Some people do better at night. Some seasons of life make mornings unrealistic. Kids, health, work schedules, and family responsibilities can all change what is possible.
The point is that the things that matter most need protected time somewhere.
If they only get the scraps, they usually get squeezed out.
One thing I like about doing my personal priorities earlier is that it removes a negotiation I am very good at losing.
If I tell myself I will exercise later, then later has to compete with fatigue, errands, messages, dinner plans, and whatever happened during the day. By then, skipping can sound reasonable. I can always start again tomorrow.
But if I do it early, I do not have to keep deciding all day whether it still matters. It is already done. The day can get messy afterward, and at least one promise to myself has survived.
That has been the bigger benefit for me. It is not just productivity. It is trust. I trust myself more when the things I say matter show up somewhere real on the calendar.
Even a small amount of time can change the feel of the day. Ten minutes reading. A short walk. A few pages of notes. A workout. A little work on a personal project that keeps getting postponed.
It does not have to be impressive to count.
I still think about this as paying myself first with time.
Not because my needs are the only ones that matter, and not because every morning has to be optimized into some perfect ritual. More because I know what happens when I assume I will get to the important personal things later.
Later is where good intentions go when they do not have a place to live.
So when I can, I try to give the first clean part of the day to something I want my life to be built around. Health. Learning. Reflection. A personal project. Sometimes just a few quiet minutes before the rest of the day begins.
I do not always get it right. But I have found that when I protect even a little time for myself before the day starts spending me, the whole day feels different.
]]>“Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition.”
Peter F. DruckerTime is the most valuable resource we have, and I am very good at telling myself little stories about why I am using it well.
Some excuses are just stories with better branding.
Some of those stories are useful for a while. Some are just excuses with better branding. These are a few time management lies I have caught myself believing, and still have to watch for.
Fact: There isn’t enough time in the day to do everything.
No matter how much we finish today, no matter how productive or efficient we are – we can only accomplish a limited amount of things and have a limited number of experiences every day.
Rather than trying to go in a million different directions every day, it’s better to pick a reasonable number of things we can do well – and enjoy.
Fact: Nothing ever takes just a minute….
And even if it does, I’ve seen estimates that say an interruption can cost you anywhere from fifteen to forty five minutes.
One lie we tell ourselves every day is how we can squeeze little things in here and there because they’ll take “just a minute”
Fact: This is almost always a lie. Properly trained, an assistant can be more effective at a specific task than you ever were. Even more important though, is it’s not about today: even if you are better than your assistant today, you may spend only a few hours a week on certain tasks.
Suppose you hire somebody part time, like someone to handle your accounting, and they might be honing that same skill for forty to sixty hours a week – with your tasks only a small part of their overall work. They will absolutely outperform you in that skill in the long run, if they don’t already.
Fact: We all have the same amount of time.
When you don’t have time to do something, it’s usually a problem of
Instead of saying “I don’t have time” – try saying “it’s just not a priority” – because that’s the truth. As Gandhi said: Action express priorities.
Fact: No time management/productivity system will be able to give you infinite time every day if the problem is ineffective follow through on tasks, or simply having way too much on your plate.
Of course, if you have a productivity system that’s not working for you, but that you’re still spending time maintaining – that’s going to cause more time management problems than it solves.
Really, ultimately I don’t think it’s about the system – it’s about habits that encourage productivity.
Fact: This is the biggest time management lie of them all.
The truth is, we can’t manage time – we can only manage our own use of it and how we spend it.
We cannot manage, save or otherwise control time.
As Stephen Covey put it:
“Time management’ is really a misnomer – the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves. The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. “
I do not think the answer is to squeeze more out of every hour. The better answer, at least for me, is to be more honest about what matters, choose deliberately, and stop treating every interruption as if it deserves equal weight.
]]>Some of that helped. Planning matters. But planning does not solve the feeling that the day is already spoken for before you have had much say in it.
You answer one more email, take one more call, move the workout, push the personal project to the weekend, and tell yourself you will think clearly once you get through the next thing.
And then there is always a next thing.
Years ago, I came across a Pew Research finding that stuck with me: when middle-class Americans were asked what was very important to them, having enough free time ranked far above being wealthy.
That made sense to me then, and it still does. Money matters. So do family, health, meaningful work, and feeling like your life is moving in a direction you respect. But free time is not extra space after the serious things are done; it is part of how those serious things stay alive.
It is time to rest, think, be with people you love without squeezing them into the corners, and reach the things you keep saying matter but somehow never quite get to.
The old phrase for the opposite feeling is time famine: having too much to do and not enough time to do it. I can relate to that more than I would like.
Time famine rarely arrives as one obviously bad decision. It arrives as one more errand, one more favor, one more project, one more week of putting off the thing I said mattered to me.
A life can become crowded with choices that all make sense in isolation, while leaving very little room for the person living it.
For a while, I thought the answer was to become more efficient. But saving ten minutes here and twenty minutes there does not solve a week that is too full for the life I say I want.
At some point, the question is not just, “How do I fit more in?” It is, “What am I willing to leave out?”
The opposite of time famine is sometimes called time affluence.
To me, time affluence means having enough control over my days that my time does not feel permanently pre-spent. It means making room for family, friends, health, and personal projects before the calendar fills itself, being more careful about what I say yes to even when the thing sounds good, and admitting that some seasons cannot hold every version of the person I want to be.
I still get this wrong. But I am more skeptical now of any solution that only asks me to move faster.
Sometimes I do not need a better system. I need a week that has more room for the life I say I want.
References: Pew Research Center on free time as a priority; Leslie Perlow’s “The Time Famine”; Giurge, Whillans, and West on time poverty.
]]>“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
I have spent a lot of time thinking about willpower, mostly because I keep finding the limits of my own.
There are things I genuinely want to do: work out, eat well, write, focus, follow through on the commitments I made when I was thinking clearly. And then there is the other version of me, the one who shows up tired and has a very persuasive case for doing whatever is easiest.
I used to think of willpower as a kind of inner force I either had or did not have, but the more I have paid attention to it, the more practical it seems. My better days usually have less temptation, better energy, and fewer decisions left until the moment I am already tired.
One of the simplest ways to improve self-discipline is to stop making myself fight the same temptation over and over again.
If I know I will eat junk food when it is in the house, then keeping it on the counter means I have to dip into my well of willpower every time I walk by it. On the other hand, if I never let those foods into my house, I do not need to deal with the temptation at all.
Similarly, if my phone is next to me while I am trying to write, I know the notifications and social media will call out to me. I can make that a test of discipline, or I can keep my phone in another room, or simply across the room, and check it during breaks.
These changes help because they spend one larger choice up front to remove a lot of smaller choices later.
This is obvious when I say it plainly, but I do not always behave as if it is true: self-discipline is much easier when I am rested, fed, and not carrying too much stress.
When I am in a good state, I can think a few steps ahead. When I am tired or hungry, it is much harder, and the easiest option starts sounding a lot more reasonable.
There is research around sleep, stress, blood sugar, decision-making, circadian rhythm, and chronotype, but I do not need a perfect theory of all of it to notice the pattern in my own life. The morning is usually when I am most effective, and the afternoon is often when I am more spent.
For me, that means I try to put the difficult things where my better energy already is. Workouts and important work tend to go earlier. Leisure activities, time with friends and family, and enjoyable personal projects like playing guitar or casual cardio fit better later in the day.
A lot of discipline problems are really decision problems in disguise.
If I have to decide whether to exercise after work, that decision is happening at a terrible time. I am already tired. Now I need to both make the “correct” decision and follow through on it. This is why plans help. The research term is implementation intentions, but the plain version is simple: decide ahead of time what you will do when a specific situation comes up.
Not “I should exercise sometime” but “on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after work, I put on my running shoes.”
A good plan does not remove all effort. It just moves the decision to a calmer place. It lets the better version of me set the default before the tired version starts negotiating.
Self-discipline is useful. I just do not want to build a life that depends on heroic self-control every day. If I keep needing that much discipline, I usually do not need a stronger lecture to myself. I need a better setup.
Originally I wrote this about my personal life, and about the little systems that help keep me on track when I am not at my best. But I notice the same pattern at work.
When a team is constantly relying on people to push through confusion, remember every edge case, chase every loose thread, and make the right tradeoff while tired, the problem is not usually that the team lacks discipline. The problem is that too much of the system depends on discipline.
The better question is not always “how do we get people to care more?” Sometimes it is “why does doing the right thing require this much effort in the first place?”