Discovery call, thirty minutes, condensed
A technical co-founder who had just taken over a team of nine. Shared with permission; name changed.
-
I think my problem is time management. I am working eleven-hour days and still nothing is finished.
-
Possibly. Tell me what you did yesterday between nine and one, in order, without editing it to sound reasonable.
-
- Rewrote a junior engineer’s pull request myself
- Two interviews I had not prepared for
- Answered forty-one Slack messages
- Ten minutes on the roadmap I have owed the board for three weeks
-
Nothing in that list is a time-management problem. Three of the four are things you have not delegated, and the fourth is the only one nobody else in the company can do.
-
I do not think they would do it as well as me. Which I realise is a terrible sentence to say out loud.
-
It is a very common sentence, and it is usually true for about six weeks. What would it have cost you if that pull request had shipped at eighty per cent of your standard?
-
Honestly? Nothing. It was internal tooling.
-
Then that is where we start. Not a calendar system — a list of what only you can do, and a plan for handing over everything else, with the mistakes budgeted for in advance.