Work on what matters.

Instead, the most effective places to work are those that matter to your company but still have enough room to actually do work. What are priorities that will become critical in the future, where you can do great work ahead of time? Where are areas that are doing ok but could be doing great with your support?

This is also an important factor to consider when choosing a company to work at! Dig into what a company values and ensure it aligns with your intended personal growth.

Where “snacking” is the broad category of doing easy and low-impact work, there’s a particularly seductive subset of snacking that I call “preening.” Preening is doing low-impact, high-visibility work.

One area that’s often underinvested in (e.g. lots of room to work in) while also being highly leveraged is growing the team around you. If you start dedicating even a couple hours a week to developing the team around you, it’s quite likely that will become your legacy long after your tech specs and pull requests are forgotten.

Pacing yourself becomes the central challenge of a sustained, successful career: increasingly senior roles require that you accomplish more and more, and do it in less and less time. The ledge between these two constraints gets narrower the further you go, but it remains walkable if you take a deliberate approach.

If something dire is happening at your company, then that’s the place to be engaged. Nothing else will matter if it doesn’t get addressed.

The final category of work that matters is the sort that you’re uniquely capable of accomplishing. This work is an intersection of what you’re exceptionally good at and what you genuinely care about.

We only get value from finishing projects, and getting a project over the finish line is the magical moment it goes from risk to leverage. Time spent getting work finished is always time well spent.

As a senior leader, you have to maintain a hold on your ego to avoid investing into meaningless work at a grand scale. Taking the time to understand the status quo before shifting it will always repay diligence with results.

If you’re taking a short-term look at career growth, then optimizing for your current organization’s pathologies in evaluating impact is the optimal path: go forth and preen gloriously. However, if you’re thinking about developing yourself to succeed as your current role grows in complexity or across multiple organizations, then it’s far more impor... See more