Worth Repeating: How I Have Time For EverythingYou already have enough time. You just need to know what to do with it.
Worth Repeating: a piece from the archive, cleaned up and sent back out. This one first ran in August 2025. People ask me all the time, “How do you have time for everything?” It’s a fair question. Two years ago I quit my job as a Principal Engineer at Amazon to make content full-time. Since then, on top of my regular YouTube videos and this newsletter, I’ve written a book and launched a podcast. I’ve started and shut down one business, and I’ve grown another. I’m also married with two young kids and two dogs, and I still make time for vacations and my hobbies. I’m a recovering productivity junkie. I’ve learned there isn’t a secret method that unlocks more hours in the day, and that most of what we call “time management” or “productivity systems” is a trap. The solution isn’t a new app or a more complex scheduling system. I know, because I’ve tried them all. Think about your last workday before a vacation. You probably got more done in those eight hours than in the entire week before. The day had the same number of hours as any other. What was the difference? Clarity. You knew exactly what had to be finished before you left and what could wait until you got back, and that made every decision about your time easy. Most weeks don’t feel like that. A thousand competing priorities all look important. The key to feeling like you have time for everything is to bring that pre-vacation clarity to an ordinary Tuesday. If we could invent a new weekday at the end of the week, let’s call it “Steveday,” most people would fill it with more meetings and low-value tasks. But by the time Monday rolled around, they’d still feel behind. For many people, an extra “Steveweek” wouldn’t solve the problem. Knowing what’s important is the constraint that holds many of us back, not the hours available. Here’s the simple framework I use to figure out what’s important. 1. You Can Say “No” to Many More Things Than You ThinkWhen the pandemic started, I was working in Live Sports for Prime Video. That project ground to a halt at the end of 2020. I suddenly had a ton of free bandwidth, so I started my YouTube channel. The following year, as my videos started to get traction, my workload at Amazon ramped back up. I was faced with a choice: give up the YouTube channel or find a new way to work. I decided to run an experiment. I committed to doing the absolute minimum at my day job that would still earn me an “Exceeds” performance rating. I identified the few projects that truly mattered for my role, and I did them to the highest possible quality, as quickly as possible. To everything else, I said no. I stopped interviewing, which was a passion of mine. I declined meetings. I ignored low-priority requests. I ignored high-priority requests. I stopped doing any “optional” work I “should” have been doing. This was incredibly hard for me. As a recovering people-pleaser, my default setting is to say yes. I want to be helpful, I want to be a team player, and I hate the feeling of letting someone down. Saying no felt like a betrayal of that identity. The result? For my last three years at Amazon, I received a Top Tier rating, the highest possible, while working significantly fewer hours. I could not believe it. There is an insidious corporate psyop that makes us feel like everything we’re doing is strictly necessary. I had an endless stream of TPMs and product managers telling me that attendance at their meetings was mandatory. It turns out that wasn’t true. I started using my manager as a shield. In our 1-on-1s, we’d get specific about my top three priorities. Whenever one of the “attendance is mandatory” people came to me, I told them to talk to my manager to clarify my priorities. I was lucky that my manager was a VP, but the principle holds at any level: if you’re aligned with your manager, you can’t get “in trouble” with partners or stakeholders. You have a choice. Don’t get railroaded by the culture of busyness. Actionable Advice: Before your next 1-on-1, write down what you think your top priorities are. Three is the max; one is ideal. Bring the list to your manager, and agree on it together. Then do a time audit for the upcoming workweek. At the end of each day, map where you spent your time to those agreed priorities. If an activity doesn't map to one of them, you've found something you can probably say no to, and you will already have your manager's backing when you do. 2. The Strategic Value of SlackOnce you’ve said no to the non-essential, you’ll discover something amazing: empty space on your calendar. Your first instinct will be to fill it. But don’t fall into that trap. I think of free time like a paycheck. On payday, your balance jumps, but most of that money is already spoken for by housing, food, and bills. A bigger number in your account is no reason to spend more. In the same way, having more free time is no reason to take on more work. Slack is a sign of effective prioritization. It’s the reward for your focus. Slack gives you room to think and respond when something unexpected shows up. A schedule packed from 9 to 5 is fragile. There’s no room, no time, to deal with crises that arise or to incubate and develop great ideas. And no time for a high-leverage conversation. When people talk about productivity, strength training, or even breathing, they focus on the active part: the deep work block, the workout, the inhale. They neglect the negative space. After intense focus, you need to turn off. After a workout that kicks your butt, you need to recover. After you breathe in, you need to breathe out. The culture of busyness tells us a full calendar is a symbol of importance, but that’s only half the picture. Being a salaried employee has distorted our sense of what work means. You’re paid to solve problems, not just to look busy for 40 hours. That won’t make you valuable. If 10 hours of intense focus and 20 hours of recharging gets you there, that beats 40 hours of pseudo-work spent in pointless meetings, compulsively checking emails, and answering every out-of-band Slack message. Actionable Advice: Schedule your slack. Just as you schedule workouts, you have to schedule recovery. Open your calendar for next week and block out two “Thinking Time” sessions. Label them clearly. When the time comes, your only job is to stay away from your primary work. Go for a walk. Stare out the window. Read a book that has nothing to do with your job. This is the exhale that makes your next inhale more powerful. You’ll know you’ve exhaled successfully when you start craving the work again. 3. The Art of Sequential FocusSometimes you can’t say no. You’ve already committed, and it’s a fait accompli. The work is important, and all of it needs to get done. You should have said no, and you’ve learned your lesson for next time. This is when the feeling of being overwhelmed is most acute. Last year I came back from an extended vacation with my workload compressed on both ends. I looked at my list and saw ten high-priority, significant items. I had already said yes to all of them. My first instinct was to go scattershot and chip away at all ten at once. But I knew that was a trap, so I told myself something simple: the best way to do ten things is to do one thing at a time, ten times. This works because of what I call the power law of sequential focus. When you work on one thing at a time, the rate at which you complete them goes way up. If you tried to do two things at once, you might expect that each task would receive half your effort. But that’s not how it works. You get less than 50/50, because every switch between tasks costs you. You have to reload the context, and the other unfinished item keeps nagging at you in the background. Gerald Weinberg put rough numbers on this in the early 1990s. By his estimate, two projects don’t get 50% of your time each. They get 40%, with 20% lost to switching. If you work on three projects, each gets 20%, and 40% is lost to switching. By five, switching will eat three-quarters of your time. But the math around effort and switching costs is only half the story. The other thing to consider is when the work will be completed. Say you have two tasks that will each take a week of focus to complete. Do them one at a time, and the first task will be done on Friday, the second on the following Friday. Juggle the two, and neither will be done until the middle of week three. Who knows how long it would take if you were to juggle ten tasks? But what you can know is that if you juggle them to the end, you’re not going to see any of them completed for a very long time. Do them one at a time, and the first task will be done in a fraction of the time, which is exactly what happened to me. I picked one task and committed to finishing it completely. In the middle of it, I had a couple of spare hours while waiting on a reply. I resisted the urge to start the next thing. Instead, I used that time to recharge. When the task was done, my list of ten became nine. That small win gave me a hit of momentum, so I picked the next one. Nine became eight. Within about a week and a half, the list was down to four. There was still a ton of work left, but the dread was gone. I could see the finish line. Compare that to the day I came back from vacation, when I absolutely couldn’t. Actionable Advice: The next time you feel overwhelmed by a long list of important tasks, do a reset.
ConclusionThis framework has never let me down. It made me more effective in my corporate life, and it opened up a world of opportunity after I left. I still fall into the trap of saying yes to too many things. But I know now that even with a million things on my plate, to breathe, I need to breathe in AND out. Giving away your slack will make you move slower. Saying no and doing one thing at a time will create the space you need. And protecting that space is what keeps you effective. So, how do I have time for everything? My “everything” consists of a small number of things that I care about very deeply. One at a time. Enjoyed this week’s newsletter? Give it a ❤️ so I know to write similar ones in the future. A Life Engineered will always be a free publication, but if you’d like to support it, we’d be honored if you upgraded your subscription. Paid subscribers get the full experience, including access to the archives.
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