Work on what matters.

Many folks would assume that companies, rational optimizers that they are, avoid spending much time on low-impact high-effort projects. Unfortunately that isn’t consistently the case. It’s surprisingly common for a new senior leader to join a company and immediately drive a strategy shift that fundamentally misunderstands the challenges at hand. Th... See more

Whatever it is, things that simply won’t happen if you don’t do them are your biggest opportunity to work on something that matters, and it’s a category that will get both narrower and deeper the further you get into your career.

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.

Worse, to be a successful preener requires a near invulnerability to criticism of your actual impact, and your true work will suffer if your energy is diverted to preening.

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.

Now that you’re done snacking, preening and chasing ghosts, the first place to look for work that matters is exploring whether your company is experiencing an existential risk. Companies operate in an eternal iterative elimination tournament, balancing future success against surviving until that future becomes the present. If you’re about to lose o... See more

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.

Existential issues are usually not the most efficient place to add your efforts, but efficiency isn’t a priority when the walls are crashing down around you. You should swarm to existential problems, but if a problem isn’t existential then you should be skeptical of adding your efforts where everyone’s already focused. Folks often chase leadership’... See more

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.

If you spend your career snacking, preening or chasing ghosts, it’s possible but relatively unlikely that what you’ve done before will be valued at companies you interview with. Instead, the only viable long-term bet on your career is to do work that matters, work that develops your and to steer towards companies that value genuine expertise.