Resource Gathering
On time management and real-time strategy games
I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing here more often (among other pursuits like reading more newsletters, watching technical talks, and playing time-consuming games like Hades II). I’m working on another blogpost about threat research, but in the meantime here’s a short post about time.
Working with other people entails effective communication. In most modern organizations, this almost certainly involves meetings and some form of Email, Slack, Discord, Teams, or an equivalent messaging platform. In research (especially in academia), a more indirect variant of this communication also occurs within circles of researchers working on overlapping subjects, by way of publishing and reading each other’s papers or blogposts.
As I’m sure many people do, in my current and past roles I’ve often found myself questioning how much time I should be spending every day on reading and writing messages, just as I wonder how much time I should be devoting to meetings. There are entire books on topics like this, and the required dosage changes depending on whether you’re a manager or an individual contributor, the size of your team and the sort of work you’re doing. Regardless, being on top of things is a seemingly universal necessity in all aspects of life.
Whenever I feel like maybe I’ve been spending too much time reading, writing, or replying to messages, I’m reminded of classic real time strategy games (RTS), such as StarCraft, Warcraft, Dune II, or Age of Empires.
Real-time strategy games
In RTS games, the player typically needs to gather certain types of resources in order to build buildings, summon units, perform upgrades, or advance through the tech tree, with the ultimate goal being to develop their offensive and defensive capabilities as fast as possible and thereby defeat the other players or reach an objective somewhere on the map (depending on whether you’re in multi-player or single-player mode).
Part of the strategy in strategy games comes down to which resources to gather, how much of your existing resources to spend on additional resource gathering efforts (such as building additional buildings and units tasked with resource discovery and retrieval), and when and how to spend resources on things that more directly influence the outcome of the game, like creating and upgrading fighting units and, more importantly, sending them into battle.
In most RTS games I’ve played, devoting all your time and resources to gathering resources is not a winning strategy.
Making an impact
Returning to the analogy, gathering resources in the professional sense – things like finishing books, watching other people’s talks, reading other people’s articles, and working through other people’s messages – can sometimes feel rewarding and seem like an accomplishment (especially when the unread count gets uncomfortably high). However, if that’s all I end up doing before lunch, it feels rather hollow (much like constructing pylons).
To me, impactful work means making tangible things happen (or actively preventing them from happening, depending on the nature of impact). So it’s important to differentiate between activities that ultimately only lead to more resources being gathered – developing skills or acquiring knowledge of what’s going on in the world and within the organization – and activities that utilize those resources to achieve measurable and impactful goals, like enabling my team members to succeed and finishing projects on time.
In individual contributor roles, I find that it’s been slightly more straight-forward for me to find the right balance between gathering resources and making things (writing, building, teaching, etc.), whereas in managerial roles, knowing what’s going on is at once both imperative and tricky to do without getting absorbed in events beyond your own scope of responsibilities.
So whenever I think I might be overdoing it, I think back to strategy games: why am I reading this lengthy Slack message? What is this resource for? Will I be able to use the information it contains to upgrade something important on my team’s tech tree or expand our base with additional turrets or walls (so to speak)? Will writing a well-thought out response to this message help achieve one of our objectives, or perhaps it would be less resource-intensive to simply call this person or organize a quick meeting?
Or maybe it would be best to just skip it altogether and even mute the Slack channel so I can focus on other things?
A means to an end
It’s tempting to invest a lot of time in resource gathering; it’s often low-effort work that can be done even when I’m tired or preoccupied, but I need to remind myself that it’s a means rather than a goal. While it can give a sense of short-term accomplishment, if I’m not careful I can end up doing it "forever" (more generally, I must be wary of potentially infinite tasks; they indicate that something has gone very wrong with my time management).
Under this paradigm, work can be divided into a few different “modes”, each of which is mutually dependent on the others:
Gathering new resources, or investing them into developing more efficient methods for gathering resources.
Investing existing resources into things of value (building things, developing skills, etc.)
Using those things to accomplish your goals (whether this means protecting your base from an enemy’s attack, destroying their base, or meeting your quarterly KPIs)
While the latter mode is obviously the most important, in practice knowing how best to invest my resources is an ongoing dilemma. I don’t always know how to solve it, but an important principle can be adopted from other multiplayer cooperative efforts: working with other people means that it’s important to prioritize resolving dependencies and divert resources to places where I’ve become a bottleneck of sorts.
In other words, avoid becoming a blocker to other people's work, and prioritize doing things that only you can do. In managerial roles, this usually involves recruitment, training, setting goals, answering questions, making decisions that solve other people’s dilemmas, reviewing other people’s work, providing them with feedback, connecting people with others who can help them, and helping people manage their own time.