I've aluded to it on Twitter. But I'm planning something for the CTO-level folks of Elixir. If you are an Elixir CTO/VP of Eng/Tech Dir or otherwise the technical leader of a company where you do a bunch of Elixir I would love to talk to you.

I'm trying to falsify my hypothesis and I need some help to do it. I'm going to talk to 10 people and I've scheduled conversation with the first 5. If you can help me round out that number that'd be fantastic.

The result should be something incredibly beneficial to that group if my hypothesis survives these conversations. Email is lars@underjord.io.

It takes time

Doing anything that is hard takes significant time. If you are constantly pressed for time you will tend to do whatever is easy for you. Anything you don't know how to do very well is hard.

If you are always super busy your work is likely constrained to be very basic.

This might seem obvious but I don't think we treat it as such. Why do technical leads and seniors often struggle with the transition to instructing others, guiding, mentoring and doing less technical work? Well. Their time tends to be in high demand. There are always tons of work that needs doing. They are heavily time-constrained and they know the technical bits very well. So that's the easy part. That's the nail that gets hammered. They can even do fairly difficult bits because that's relatively easy compared to tackling the human side of the job.

The same goes for why I've never learned an instrument. It would take a large investment of time and I can do a lot of other creative stuff that I'm more comfortable and capable in. I'm very time-constrained, especially during non-work hours, so noodling around with a guitar and trying to learn how to do it feels impossible. While for others, writing a blog post will feel impossible while playing some guitar is a quick thing. Because they already know how.

A thing I'm happy about is that I've created space in my schedule, time, to do some of the things I'm not super practiced in, videos for example, and I have the time there to actually work through it and practice. There are time constraints, I'm not making cinema, I can only do so many scenes and fairly simple scripts. But it is enough to build a skill that was hard.

Doesn't doing that make me busy? Sort of. The time I spend with video work is loose. I don't know how much time writing the script will take, I don't know how much time rigging will take, I don't know how much time recording will take and I don't know if the end result will actually be usable. The time is scheduled with loose blocks and margin. It is not necessarily a relaxed block of time but I wouldn't describe it as busy.

Similarly if I'm trying to solve something where I'm out of my depth in programming, the solution is generally to start by allocating more time than usual. Time for research, time for thinking, time for sketching, time for discussion, time for asking people, time for implementation.

Sometimes you are in a mode where you need to stay busy and execute, execute and execute. I believe that's less likely to be where you solve the hard problems.

Mind your time.

I have some time to receive and reply to email at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter via @lawik.

I appreciate you putting your time into reading this. Thanks.