Spending Time To Work Out How To Spend Time

I've recently left my job as an engineer to help a friend start up his company. One core thing that a big company does for you when you work for them is give you direction. You don't have to look at where you want to get to and work out how to forge a path to get there: usually you go into a company and your manager tells you what to do. Then you go ahead and do it.

One of the hardest things I've found so far is to give myself direction. After coming out of a corporate environment, it's all too easy to feel lost, not see a clear path to go down, and then procrastinate by watching Seinfeld (my latest addiction) all day. I've found that I need to start spending a bit of time in the morning, taking a step back, thinking about the work that needs to be done, before I'm able to go ahead with my work for the day. This is the time I spend working out how to spend my time.

I'm lucky that I had a little bit of complexity in my last job, to acquaint me with how to overcome unknowns. The more complex your job is, the more unknowns you'll need to address and then illuminate before getting your work done. In my last job, I had what I'd like to call 'micro unknowns'. I knew the task, but I didn't know how to get from where I was to a point where the task was complete: at least not completely. When you're given micro unknowns, you're given a direction & an end-point, your job work out the path from where you are to the end point.

Now, I've got two unknowns. I've got micro unknowns, but I've macro unknowns as well: working out what the tasks are. This involves thinking about all the potential things that I could do, the market for those things, the skill-set I have to achieve these things, and why I'd want to do them. The macro unknowns are what give us direction and an end-point.

And then, at the simpler end of the spectrum, you can choose to do a job that requires no unknowns. I've lately experienced this after becoming a Deliveroo rider for a while. There's something strangely rewarding about doing a low-skill, labour intensive task. I think it's because there are no micro- or macro- unknowns. All you need to do is: get the food. Give food to customer. Rinse and repeat. You know exactly what you need to do, all that's left is to do it. You can get into flow without constantly coming up against barriers of the next unknown. And then when your shift is over, there are no loose ends to tie up. You know exactly where you stand and you can completely forget about the job until next time.

It's a skill to manage unknowns in your job, but I feel like I'm learning how to deal with them. And this blog post helps: the first step to solving a problem is understanding the problem.