📖 Business
Finite Time
Your time is the most expensive resource at your disposal — and at staff level, everyone wants a piece of it. Code reviews, design reviews, mentoring, meetings, incident response, side projects, "quick questions" that take an hour. Reilly argues that the core discipline of staff engineering is ruthless prioritization for impact. Not productivity hacks or time management tricks, but a fundamental shift in how you decide what gets your attention. Every yes is an implicit no to something else. If you're not saying no to things, you're not doing your job — you're just being busy.
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How It Works
The prioritization framework has three tiers:
- What only YOU can do — Work that requires your specific context, relationships, or expertise. Nobody else in the org can do this. These tasks come first, always. Examples: architectural decisions in your domain, unblocking a stalled cross-team initiative only you have the relationships for, making a technical call that requires your specific system knowledge.
- What creates leverage — Work that multiplies your impact beyond the immediate output. Writing documentation that answers questions for 50 people. Building automation that saves hours every week. Training someone to handle a class of problems so they stop coming to you. These tasks are investments — they reduce future demand on your time.
- What's urgent but delegable — Important work that someone else can do, even if they'd do it 80% as well. Delegate it, coach them through it, or decline it. Your 80% solution to a problem someone else could own is a net negative — it solves the problem while preventing someone else from growing.
Energy management is equally important. Some tasks drain you, some energize you. Schedule your most important, creative work for when your energy peaks. Don't waste your best hours on email and status updates. Track your energy patterns for a week — you'll find clear peaks and valleys.