Your Calendar Isn't the Problem

An engineer I was talking with recently is trying to get a business off the ground on the side. He built a developer tool, a good one. Real, working, with a handful of early users. Now it needs the part that isn’t engineering: marketing it, putting it in front of people, getting it into the world. That’s where he’s stuck.

When I asked why it wasn’t moving, the answer was the obvious one.

I don’t have time.

The days are full, sure. The day job is real work.

But I’ve gotten suspicious of I don’t have time, because it’s the most respectable lie there is. It sounds like a calendar problem.

But it almost never is.

What would you do with the time?

So I started with a question.

If someone from work called tomorrow and said take the day off, it’s covered, what would you do with it?

He wasn’t sure how to answer, and hesitantly spilled out fragments of ideas.

Post in the developer communities? Cold-call developers? Record a video for social media? Find a pro to make the video as polished as the companies he admired?

To be honest, I don’t know. I kind of need to prioritize all that, he said. But that takes time.

So I asked another question.

What would be hard about getting started tomorrow?

He paused. Then the honest answer.

Even with the time, he wouldn’t know which one to start with.

And underneath that, quieter still, he wasn’t sure any of them would work.

None of the tasks were sharp enough to pick up and start. And none of them had a clear payoff.

Even when I have the time, I avoid it, he admitted.

And there it was. The time was never the problem. The ambiguity was.

When you have twenty things you could do and no way to know which one pays off, a free afternoon doesn’t help. You spend it the way you spend the busy ones. Circling, weighing, avoiding.

That isn’t a scheduling problem. It’s twenty options and a fear that none of them are the right one.

Here’s the part worth slowing down on.

Most of the items on his list weren’t really his. They were what he imagined a successful version of himself was supposed to be doing.

No wonder it wouldn’t move. He was trying to choose the optimal play, the one with the best odds, from a menu of things he’d never done and mostly didn’t want to.

But there was no optimal play to choose. None of these had a knowable payoff. There was nothing to rank them by.

So this was never about setting the bar high or low. The bar was imaginary.

And once the bar is imaginary, the math gets simple. Aim at the impressive move you won’t actually do, and you get nothing. Aim at the one that comes naturally to you, and it has the same odds of working, you’ll learn something from doing it, and, the part that matters most, you’ll actually do it.

So I didn’t help him prioritize. We never ranked a thing.

I asked a different question. Not what’s the best move, but which of these would you actually do, as yourself?

Which would you actually do?

The answer came fast, once the question changed.

Talk to people. He liked that. Cold-calling developers wasn’t repulsive to him, just a little scary, and those are very different things. And recording a rough video himself: not the studio version, just him and his phone, excited about the thing he made. That, he could picture.

Two moves. Out of what felt like an infinite list.

Nothing got crossed off by logic. The list collapsed because the standard changed. The moment the question stopped being which move is most likely to work and became which one can I actually picture myself doing, eighteen options fell away on their own. They were never things he’d do. Only things he thought he was supposed to.

When you catch yourself saying I don’t have time, it’s worth one more question:

If I did, would I even know what to do with it?