· Engineering · 6 min read
Your Time Is Deep Work. Everyone Else Is Just Being Slow.
Your unanswered email is a matter of priorities. Theirs is apparently negligence. From beer invitations to API calls, we keep mistaking work we can't see for work that doesn't exist — and charging our quick questions to someone else's time.
We treat our own time as a sacred temple and everyone else’s time as free real estate.
It’s Wednesday afternoon, and you text a friend: “Hey, up for a beer this Friday?” From your perspective, the entire transaction is beautifully simple. Beer, pub, Friday, probably seven. Your brain has already moved on to whatever important thing you were doing, which may or may not involve watching a man pressure-wash a driveway.
Your friend, meanwhile, has received a logistics bomb. Before replying, they need to check their calendar, their partner’s calendar, childcare arrangements, and whether “a beer” means one drink or an evening that ends with someone explaining cryptocurrency to a kebab. There is also the question of which pub you mean and whether Friday’s remaining emotional bandwidth can accommodate trousers with a zip. You sent seven words; they opened a planning department. An hour later, you check your phone and wonder how hard it can possibly be to say yes or no.
The answer is often sitting in your own inbox. That email you’ve left unanswered since Tuesday requires checking something, consulting someone, and finding a tactful way to explain that the proposed deadline belongs in the fantasy section. You haven’t ignored it. You’re managing priorities.
The email you sent forty minutes ago, however, appears to have fallen into a mysterious organisational void, so you follow up on Slack: “Hey! Just pinging this here in case it got lost in your inbox! 😊” The emoji is there to make the surveillance feel friendly. Somehow, your own delayed response is evidence of a demanding job, while somebody else’s is evidence that they need supervision.
This double standard is easy to maintain because we can see our own complications in glorious detail. We know which documents are missing, which decisions are politically radioactive, and which apparently simple request depends on three people who are currently on holiday. We can even account for the twenty minutes spent staring at the screen because we couldn’t face another spreadsheet.
Other people’s complications usually arrive as silence, and silence leaves plenty of room for an explanation in which they are just being useless. From inside our own work, we see the whole obstacle course. From outside theirs, we see a person who hasn’t crossed the finish line yet.
It’s literally just an API call
Product development provides a particularly enjoyable demonstration because both sides can perform this trick within the same afternoon. A developer waits three weeks for a user story and wonders how anyone can take that long to write a paragraph. Somewhere, presumably, a stakeholder is being paid to gently age a Word document.
Behind that paragraph, though, there may be five teams with incompatible requirements, a legal review, and three meetings about which direction a loading spinner should rotate. That last one isn’t a stretch. I personally lived through a nearly six-month saga of disputes over whether a loading spinner should rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise. Humanity built particle accelerators, but we still need a steering committee for a circle.
Then the story arrives, the developer estimates forty hours, and the stakeholder immediately returns the favour: “Why do you need a full week? It’s literally just an API call.” Which is true in roughly the same sense that a restaurant is literally just putting food on plates. That one call needs to call three other microservices, one of whose API contracts doesn’t support the parameter you need. So now your little task involves changing another service and coordinating with the team that owns it. The call also comes attached to a data model, validation rules, permissions, failure handling, tests, and a deployment process with the temperament of a rescue cat.
Each side recognises the other’s visible output and quietly deletes everything required to produce it. Their own preparation is skilled work under difficult conditions; the other person’s preparation is apparently an unfortunate typing-speed problem.
The Context Reconstruction Tax
The missing work also includes whatever your request creates merely by arriving. “Quick question: why did we decide against that approach in March?” You’ve just been thinking about March, so the question feels small. The recipient has spent the morning inside an entirely different problem, and March is currently archived somewhere between an expired password and the location of their spare bicycle key. They need to find the discussion, remember the alternatives, and reconstruct which constraint mattered at the time.
Once they’ve answered, they still have to recover the thread you interrupted. Call this the Context Reconstruction Tax: the effort of rebuilding enough background to do something useful, then rebuilding the background you displaced. “Quick” usually describes how long it takes to ask.
Follow up through Slack, email, and a meeting invitation, and you’ve given the same question three opportunities to collect that tax. Meanwhile, the person receiving all three can spend a substantial part of the day demonstrating that work is happening instead of doing it. This makes for a peculiar definition of productivity: we defend our own ability to concentrate, then judge everyone else by how readily they abandon concentration for us. A calendar full of focus blocks becomes considerably less impressive when half your outgoing messages begin with “Got a minute?”
There is a practical way to make this less stupid, and it starts before pressing Send. Include the actual question instead of asking permission to eventually reveal it. Explain which decision depends on the answer and when you need to make that decision. If you’re asking about March, link the March discussion; you’ve already conducted the archaeological expedition.
“Can you confirm by Thursday whether this is feasible? We need to choose between these two options on Friday” gives someone enough information to prioritise. “Quick one 😊” gives them a small mystery with teeth.
Of course, some delays really are avoidance, and some processes really are ridiculous. A loading spinner doesn’t become a profound governance challenge just because twelve people attended. But before deciding that somebody else’s work should be easy, it helps to remember how much of your own work disappears from view once the result leaves your desk.
Open the request you’ve been postponing because it needs “a proper look,” then consider whether the person you’re chasing might have an equally elaborate explanation. Your time is deep work. Theirs might be too, even if all you wanted was a beer.
If these office absurdities feel suspiciously familiar, there’s more where they came from in my IT Dictionary.
