Doing nothing at work
3 hours ago
- Engineers should aim for 80% utilization, spending 20% of work time away from the computer to stay available for high-impact opportunities.
- High-impact work often involves trivial effort at the right time, such as unblocking enterprise deals, mitigating incidents, or speeding up high-profile features.
- Being perpetually busy prevents noticing opportunities and discourages managers from volunteering you for impactful tasks.
- Deliberately doing nothing reduces stress, enables better decision-making during incidents, and allows new ideas to surface.
- Avoid glue work that lacks organizational priority, as it wastes time and masks systemic issues.
- Protect yourself from predatory requests that extract uncompensated work via backchannels.
- Delay reactive work (e.g., changing designs) until stable to avoid wasted effort.
- Reserve intense effort for a few high-reward occasions per year; otherwise, maintain a slower pace.
- Success in software engineering depends on doing the right things at the right time, not on scaling technical effort.