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July 20, 2026

Where is my time going?

Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

As I'm sending this, I'm already in NYC! A trip my wife planned for my birthday. I'm probably jet-lagged, but I hope you had a great weekend and managed to rest.

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

  • Enjoyed the World Cup final, sadly Argentina didn't win, but that's football.
  • Learning a few things about running SQLite by Julia Evans, I've always enjoyed her methods for sharing what she's learning.
  • 200 milliseconds It's an interesting blog post about Node.js internals and how they handle a request.
  • The Wing by Clever Looks unreal, such a great 60% keyboard.

Lately, I was talking with a peer about time management, it feels like we were going slowly about a project, but in reality, there are so few people to support that between very few folks we were pushing forward the project.

I think the conversation was not really about time management, but more like time bankruptcy.

In other projects, there's a similar experience, one or two folks are very in the weeds doing most of the "stuff", but also the other people of the same team are singularly focused on other projects, so there's no time to even think about knowledge-sharing between all teammates.

In my own work, I need to be on the weeds during this critical portion of the project, and there's other work I want to focus on, more long-term focused, but I haven't reached a point where the project can be left to run by other folks.

There's something to be said for trusting other people to take it on, but very few people have volunteered (so I guess that's another problem to think about).

In other ways, some folks are not taking on more work unless they are formally assigned to it.

But where is my time going? A lot of time is going into tasks to unblock other people or help out (office hours, documentation). The other portion is going into the meeting to handle the "project management" part, unblock networks, and submit tickets to other teams for support, etc.

Not sure where to find more time, really, and working more hours isn't a sustainable practice.

Your turn!

Have you felt overwhelmed by the expectation to do more work due to AI layoffs, or just by having fewer people around? Our teams take on more. What are your thoughts on this? Let me know by replying to this email.

Happy coding!


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