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The watercooler for ideas, opinions, and fun topics as it relates to product, design, and engineering in the world of software...and maybe more. Guess we will find out!
Let's say that.
Every year.
Twice a year.
You and your kids spend a couple of
days together doing something huge.
Maybe it's a trip to Disney world.
Maybe it's a trip to Italy
or to some tropical island.
Uh, but the rest of the year, You don't.
Spend that much time with them.
You don't.
Uh, you don't go out to eat together.
You don't eat dinners together at a table.
You don't play games together.
Uh, you go about your work.
You let them go about their school.
You let them go about their life
and you don't make sure to have time
together, except for those two really
big, really fun trips, because that's.
That was your goal.
You want to, you want to make sure you
have these really awesome times together.
Let's say on the other hand,
You don't go on any fun trips.
You don't go.
On exotic adventures, you
don't go on any of these giant.
Vacations, but you eat
dinner together every night.
You play games together.
You spend time together, even if the
time is not spent doing something huge.
Today.
I want to talk about the
difference between quantity,
time versus quality time.
Uh, both in personal
life and in work and why?
I think.
Quantity time is more
important than quality time.
This is episode six of strong opinions.
Weakly held.
My name is will king.
Let's do.
Okay.
So quantity time versus quality time.
I hope they example that we
opened up with kind of gives you.
An idea of.
It feels, it might, might've been
set up to be a little biased, but,
um, I heard something similar to that
where somebody said quantity times
more important than quality time.
Uh, and as a parent, sometimes you would
think, man, I really want to make sure
that I do these awesome things with
my kids, that they have a good time.
Uh, but what this person.
Tried to, to make an argument for which.
I bought in on clearly.
Is that quantity, time is more important.
And I'm going to tell you
why I bought in on it.
If you only focus on your children or
focus on doing things with anyone, with
any relationship, if the only time that
you're focused on that relationship
is when something big and important.
Or big and fun or big and
incredible is happening.
How strong is that
relationship going to be?
How, how able are you for those big
moments to be able to squeeze every.
Every little bit of juice out of that.
If you haven't also put time
into, uh, the quantity time.
Uh, if you haven't spent time.
Being together when it's awkward.
Uh, trying to weather the relationship
when you're upset at each other.
Uh, you're not working through like,
just being together when nothing's going
on or just being together every day.
Uh, When you do have those moments.
To do something that is.
Have a higher quality and you're
not able to take advantage of them.
Because you don't have
like a relationship.
You don't have like a good,
you don't have inside jokes.
You don't have back and forth.
There are no bits.
Yeah, you have no bits.
You don't have any inside jokes.
You don't have a relationship.
If the only thing that
you're concerned about.
Is those moments.
Uh, when it's going to be fun or exciting.
Uh, it will think about this with school.
Like I think about like, man, it is
so hard to make friends as adults.
And.
You can ask yourself, well, why.
Well, the reason, uh, one reason that
it's so hard to make friends as adults
is because you don't get quantity time.
You may get a few times where
you get to go to a conference,
or maybe you go on like a really
fun trip with a group of adults.
Or you go out to eat once
a month or something.
Where you get these, like
these moments of quality time.
With someone, but you can't
build a real relationship, the
same kind of relationships that
you did with childhood friends.
Why?
Well, let's think about childhood friends.
On the reverse scale of things.
A lot of times in childhood,
you weren't doing something that
was like super high quality.
You were just doing a lot of it.
You would go to school together and
every day you'd be going through all
of your classes, listening to lectures,
doing homework, doing things that are
not fun by them in and of themselves.
But because you did them so often
for so long with the same people.
Guess who are now your best friends?
Guests about how all those
inside jokes come around.
You know, a lot of inside jokes don't
come because of something like good.
They, they are generally ways of like
laughing at something bad that happened.
Uh, with friends.
So.
There's this, this idea that it's
more important to spend a quantity
of time with somebody than to focus
on quality of time with somebody.
And I think that I think
that's really accurate.
Um, And I think that also.
Plays into, if we think about careers,
Um, and think about our like skillsets.
As developers or designers
or whatever products, people
like, whatever we're building.
A lot of time.
Uh, it's more important for, for
quantity of time spent in something.
Then the quality of
time spent in something.
Now I want to just make a caveat here.
That like these are not exclusive.
You know, I'm not saying that you
should only have quantity time.
I'm not saying that you
should only have quality time.
Uh, what I'm saying is that like,
You're going to have a lot more
opportunities for quantity time.
So you should focus.
And invest in quantity of
time and take advantage of the
quality time when you can get it.
So, what does that mean for
like, Career projects, et cetera.
I think to me, like what that
represents is like, there's this
difference between like, um, Jumping.
In, in today's age.
What you see a lot of is people
who go from project to project.
Uh, who jump company to company who
are there for like a year or so.
And then they move on to a new opportunity
work there for a year or so, and move on.
Uh, and you look at their resume and you
see all of these like important logos.
Uh, you will look at all
these important big projects.
Uh, and you think, wow,
they are really good.
They've got a lot of high quality signals.
Uh, but when like, The
rubber meets the road.
Um, A lot of times you can
find gaps in that skillset.
And the reason why is because
they've not spent a quantity
of time on the same problem.
Now.
That's not always the case.
There's always these like weird.
Um, They're obviously like.
Cases where like you may jump around
a lot, but you're working on the
same problem every single time.
So you've you get some mastery there?
Um, but we're not going to talk.
We're not talking about those weird,
those like weird in between cases.
We're going to just talk generally.
Um, and with the knowledge that
there's like gray area in between.
So.
When you.
Become really good at something.
Is when you've spent so much time with it.
That you just, it is just like ingrained.
Into your system.
You know, I heard a saying that, uh, what
makes somebody a senior engineer is not.
The like number.
Uh, Of ways that they can solve a problem,
but knowing which solu, like knowing
which solutions to immediately check off
the list to reduce, uh, the decision.
A tree.
And that means.
Uh, that means they've spent a lot
of time in that problem and they
understand how they've, they've
probably gone down a lot of those paths.
They understand the context because
they've experienced this context
before and they can rule out a
bunch of solutions because they know
they won't work in this context.
Uh, and that's because.
They spent like a quantity
of time doing something.
There's a lot of like
information and knowledge.
You'll kind of notice this whenever
you're learning something new.
Do you ever feel like
you start learning it?
And like you take one whole pass
through it and you may have gotten
like one good thing out of it.
And then you go through it again.
And like, you understand like a little
bit more and a little bit more and you
just slowly begin to like soak in this
new information, this new concept.
Uh, and like next thing, like, you
know, you could do a whole nother
project with that and it'd be way easier
and you'd probably learn something.
Uh, even to deepen your knowledge the
next time, even more when you did it.
That's this concept of like
quantity versus quality.
In our professions, like you
shouldn't just be looking
for like big name projects.
You shouldn't be looking for
like big splashy things to do.
Uh, Only because like, if that's the
only thing that you're doing, your,
your information is staying surface
level because you're jumping around.
You never get any deep
expertise in anything.
this is also something that you
see if you're at a company, I
think this is like one of the most
valuable things that you can do.
Uh, with your career, if you
want to like really step up.
Your level of expertise is to, um, stick
around long enough to have to solve.
Your own problems.
Uh, So like, uh, in a code base, for
example, or designs for that matter.
Uh, once you solve for something,
solve for a problem in a product.
And you build it.
If you're not staying around.
Let me rephrase it this way.
You get to learn so much personally.
If you stick around long
enough in a project.
To where your decisions become legacy.
Decisions.
Uh, that is, to me what it means about
spending quantity of time on a problem.
If you have stuck around long enough, For
the decisions that you originally made
to become legacy decisions and it's then
your job to fix your original decisions
So do you want to get more depth?
More expertise.
You want to build deeper
relationships, build deeper knowledge.
Then you need to be focusing on the
quantity of time you're spending doing
something, not only on the quality,
instead of focusing on hitting the
high points and the most important
points you need to spend time digging
in on the parts that are more boring.
The parts that seem more tedious because
when it comes down to it, It's about
how long you spend on something, not
how great the time you spend on it is.