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Home > Developer Tea > Take Back Your Time - Volatility, Pliability, and Agency and Your Obligations.mp3
Podcast: Developer Tea
Episode:

Take Back Your Time - Volatility, Pliability, and Agency and Your Obligations.mp3
Category: Technology
Duration: 00:14:30
Publish Date: 2025-05-01 07:00:00
Description:

This episode provides tactical ways to own your time, reduce meeting load and obligations, and regain agency, especially when feeling burnt out. You'll learn how to use a simple two-part model focusing on Pliability and Volatility to evaluate your tasks and meetings and make intentional choices about how you spend your time.

  • Learn how owning your time is a critical first step in combating burnout, tiredness, and feeling worn out, helping you evaluate whether you feel agency over your time.
  • Understand the principle that not all time is equal, whether it's sacred personal time or different times of day at work, and why you shouldn't treat it equally.
  • Discover a simple two-part model using the characteristics of Pliability and Volatility to evaluate your obligations, such as meetings and tasks.
  • Learn the definition of Pliability – how easily an obligation can be moved, changed, or cancelled, representing its flexibility.
  • Understand the definition of Volatility – the risk, downsides, and potential compound negative effects associated with changing or not attending an obligation.
  • Evaluate your tasks and meetings using their Pliability and Volatility scores to identify obligations that can likely be moved, made smaller, or cancelled with minimal downside, particularly those with low volatility and high pliability.
  • Explore why our perception of the criticality of our obligations is often inflated, and how the actual ramifications of changing them are usually much smaller than what we expect.
  • Learn how applying this model can help you consolidate obligations, create longer blocks of focus time (especially useful for engineers), and ultimately regain ownership and agency over your schedule.
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