by Serguey Shinder
By ten past ten I had told three different people they would have something from me by the end of the day. The first was a colleague who needed a config change, five minutes of work. The second was a summary for a manager, half an hour if I concentrated. The third was a fix for a customer-facing bug that I estimated at two hours and which was, in reality, about three.
Add those up and it is under four hours of work in a day with seven available. I made all three promises without hesitation because each one, considered alone, was obviously fine.
I delivered all three. I delivered them at eighteen minutes past six, in a state I would describe as fraying, having spent the afternoon in a loop of touching each one, making some progress, and then moving to another because I could feel the other two waiting.
The arithmetic that was missing is not the arithmetic of hours. Four hours of work fits comfortably in seven. What does not fit is three live obligations, because each one occupies something whether or not I am working on it. There is a background process for every promise, checking whether it is safe to still be doing this other thing, and that process runs all day. I did roughly four hours of work and spent the rest supervising myself.
The real cost showed up in the bug fix. Three hours of concentration, but not three consecutive hours, and the version I shipped at six had a rough edge in it that I would have seen at any point on a quiet afternoon. Someone found it the following week. So the day did not even hold, which is the ordinary ending to these stories.
What I do now is a rule I keep in a notebook because I do not trust myself to remember it under social pressure. Two things with a today on them. That is the limit, and it is a limit on commitments rather than on hours. The third request gets a straight answer, which is that I have two things promised for today and I can do this first thing tomorrow, or I can do it today and one of those moves. Almost nobody minds. What people mind is being told today and getting it at six, or at ten the next morning with an apology.
The part I found hardest was accepting that saying yes three times had never been generosity. It felt like generosity in the moment. It was a decision to do all three worse, made on behalf of three people who were not in the room together and could not see what it was costing.
A promise is not free at the moment you keep it. It starts charging you at the moment you make it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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