The Neediest Colleague I Have Ever Hired

Twelve days ago I wrote that the wait is forty seconds. I was guessing.

This week I actually measured it. Every session transcript sitting on my machine, one thousand nine hundred and twenty five of them. Over the last two weeks the median wait, from me hitting enter to the thing coming back, is thirty six seconds.

So I was right. I enjoyed that for about four minutes.

Because being right meant the fix I built on top of it should have worked. I decided the enemy was boredom, put music on, made a one button way back so returning cost nothing, and called it play. It did work, in the moment, and I still do all of it. But my brain is more fried now than it was in July. Massively. So something in there was wrong.

I went back to the numbers looking for the one I had never bothered to count.

Two hundred. That is roughly how many times a day the thing comes back to me. On the worst day this month, three hundred and fifty five.

You can make a thirty six second wait pleasant. Music, a good chair, a tennis ball. You cannot make two hundred interruptions pleasant. There is no chair for that.

I had spent a month optimising the duration when the problem was the frequency.

And the frequency is not the machine’s fault, which is the part that stung. It comes back every ninety seconds because I hand it ninety seconds of work. A step, not an outcome. It does the step, it comes back for the next instruction, obedient as anything.

Which is genuinely hysterical if you look at it straight on. I went and got myself a machine so that things could happen without me, and what I have actually acquired is the neediest colleague I have ever worked with. It cannot go ninety seconds alone. It taps me on the shoulder two hundred times a day and every single tap is reasonable. In July I described myself as a dog that had been told to stay. Wrong animal, wrong end of the lead.

So “it needs me” cannot be the thing that summons me, because it will always need me. That is not an event, it is a property. If need is what calls you to the desk, you are at the desk permanently, and you will feel useful the entire time you are being eaten.

Which leaves one honest number, and it is not the one I have been quietly proud of. Not how many agents I am running. How rarely they need me. That is the leverage, the whole of it. Two hundred pings a day is not leverage. It is a very fast thing on a very short lead, and I am the lead.

So the fix is embarrassingly plain. Ask for bigger things. Then go away.

I don’t go away. That is the honest bit. Not because I don’t know how, but because going away requires trusting it, and I have been sitting here anxiously watching this computer like the watching does something.

It does nothing. I have never once improved an output by observing it being made. Watching is not quality control. It is anxiety with a good view.

So I have stopped waiting to feel trusting and started faking it structurally. There is a timer on my phone now. Fifteen minutes. I brief the thing, start the timer, and I am not allowed back until it goes off. Then ten minutes to look at everything at once, properly, send the next round, and leave again.

Fifteen is not a productivity setting, by the way. It is a grade. It is fifteen because fifteen minutes is roughly what my current briefs are worth. There is a forty five minute button next to it that I am not allowed to press yet, and a ninety after that. I move up when the work gets bigger, not when I feel ready.

And what that buys, if it works, is not more output. Roughly the same amount, actually. What changes is that most of the day I am on holiday. Flip in for ten minutes, look at everything with a clear head, flip out, go and do whatever the hell I want. Come back when the bell goes. That is the entire prize, and I would like to be clear that I think it is an excellent prize.

It is very convenient that after a month of feeling fried, the conclusion I have reached is “delegate better and relax more.” That is precisely what I would conclude if I simply wanted an afternoon off, and I would like to state for the record that I do want an afternoon off.

Anyway. The forty five minute button is sitting there on my home screen, greyed out in my head. I would quite like to earn it.