101. On the Power of Weekly Time Commitments 🔗

Over the last 3 years with the @yak_collective I’ve really come to appreciate the power of committing a small amount of weekly time over a long period. If you have 10 hours to spare for me, I’ll pretty much always pick an hour a week for 10 weeks over 10 hours in 1 day .

Lifestyles tend to be stable for 3-5y at a time. If you commit 1 hour/wk indefinitely, that’s implicitly 150-250 hours if it sticks. Equal to 4-6 weeks of full-time, but that’s harder to use 🤔

An hour is optimal. Can’t do much with 15-30min, but >1h calls for too much org/prep.

It sounds powerful to get 4-6 weeks full-time commitment from a talented person (especially skilled ones who can code or design etc) but it’s actually useless because 4-6 weeks means you can create something complex enough to need maintenance/follow through.

I’d rather have you in back-burner “maintenance” mode where you do what you can an hour a week.

Older people have more stable lives and are more easily able to commit to such patterns which is why, interestingly enough, YC has skewed older than most things I’ve been involved in

Another interesting difference is that people who show up week after week with drip-irrigation levels of attention are able to do very different things (and cannot do other sorts of things calling for intense efforts). These things tend to feature infinite-game intentions.

This also favors older people. Younger people (understandably) have highly time-sensitive demands on attention, to “make it” in their careers/dating etc. Older people tend to have satisfied these demands somewhat and are more into “rest of my life” inexhaustible activities.

This pattern needs a name. Most social organizing is goal-oriented, aiming for ambitious things requiring intensive time/effort commitments. This is more systems > goals as Scott Adams put it. Build a “show up” habit first. Decide what to do based on who actually forms the habit.

An alt tagline for @yak_collective could be “building weird habits together”

Another nice thing about operating with an indeterminate horizon is that once a core basal metabolic rate has been established, it can absorb the vagaries of individual availability a lot better.

If you have someone full-time for 4-6w and they fall ill, your project is probably screwed. If you have someone for 1h/wk indefinitely, you can absorb illness, travel, spikes on other fronts, etc.

We’ve had people drop out/productively re-engage on YC stuff with gaps of months

It’s paradoxical, but even though young people have a lot more total time left in life they seem to have a far stronger sense of time-scarcity, like they must fulfill all ambitions by 30 because 30 is death or something.

If you have time-scarcity mindset, it’s far easier to commit 4-6w full-time than 1h/wk for an indefinite period. Some weird discounting thing going on.

Also, fear of habit formation. 1h/wk forms new habits. 4-6w full-time harvests existing habits. Learning vs doing commitment.

This is kinda interesting. It’s easier to learn/form new habits when young, but your “habit bandwidth” is kinda limited by personality and it makes sense to be wary of how you allocate it. Because your habits define who you are by mid-30s or so.

35+ people seem mildly surprised by themselves if they learn anything new at all. They’ve been so conditioned to think they can’t learn past 35 or so, any learning/new good habits feels like an unexpected habit-bandwidth bonus.

A danger though is that a community built around “regulars” has less use for legible processes and explicit structure. People get to know each other and internalize norms and new people can’t easily read the group and learn how to participate. So you get bounce rates creeping up.

Like most discord-based communities we have a high pass-through rate. 90% of people come by, introduce themselves, and vanish. I’d guess 70% were just curious, 20% have misaligned “intense participation” expectations. The 10% who get it instinctively operate in “show up” mode

In rare cases, people show up again much later when they get it, and are in a place where a low-key “show up” pattern seems valuable to them.

Let’s call this pattern “show-up sticky systems” — complex systems whose evolution is entirely a function of who shows up regularly. We’ve had strong and sincere participants show up and participate with intensity for a while, but sadly very little of what they do “sticks”

This means it’s not just hard to truly join, it’s hard to start anything new. Many people show up, are excited to find a decent level of existing participation, and imagine it’s available as a social “resource” to get interesting things done. Yes and no.

Yes, if you’re grok the “show up” frame. Say you show up for our Friday governance studies chat regularly for 3-4 weeks, and then propose a new track on say geology. You might get a nibble. Show up for 8 weeks and incept/notice geology conversations, much more likely to take root

In fact, so long as it’s not ultra-specialized, the topic doesn’t matter. People with a time-abundance habit-formation mentality tend to be rather indiscriminate in what they sign up for. The clincher is not the topic but a reliable driver and a (low) critical mass of 2-3 people.

Hmm. Just hit me that this is also how my consulting practice works for me at its best. If you want to hire me for 20h but use my time in a 1h/week or even 1h/month way, I can do vastly more for you than if you try to have me do 3 full-time “leadership retreat” days.

I suspect the common feature is compound interest on mutual learning. You get to know each other as well as the shared topic, in compounding ways. Not least because you shallow-sample an evolutionary trajectory rather than doing a deep snapshot.

For eg. We’ve been doing our rover project for ~2y now. It’s our most “intense” project since the weekly call is zoom rather than audio, and has presentations. Very slow. We’ve logged ~150-200 each I’d guess. 100h shared talk, 100h solo work…

…But I think we’ve all learned more and different things about rovers and robotics than we would have if had done an intense 200h “rover bootcamp” over 1 month. We’ve sort of built a sustainable rover-ing “habit” as a hobby.

Actually, an intense rover bootcamp now would be high value, though it would be hard or impossible to arrange (flip side of a lifestyle of many 1h/week commitments is it’s harder to just get away from your life to immerse yourself in 1 thing)

Yep, but it’s really easy to do that. Scraps of time here and there really add up around a core regular commitment. Time that would otherwise dissipate. Eg. a minute to notice and share a rover-related link. And it feels like harvesting bonus “free” time instead of zero-sum. tweet^[1]

Stuff we’ve done together:

2-3 reports
1 paid project
1 white paper nft
Half a dozen hobby rovers in various stages of maturity
Bunch of discord bots
Complex website
Roam db with a lot of content
3 study tracks with deep archives
1 coworking group
A “fermi gym”

Not counting a lot of individual collaborations and incubating things that haven’t quite stabilized

Show-up systems are the social equivalent of spaced-repetition learning I think. We evolve with bite-sized interactions. An hour a week is like reviewing a deck of anki cards regularly.

Another data point. MtG type products I guess are peculiarly well suited to this kind of development model. No intense launches or heavy lift finishes. Just steady progress. tweet^[2]

This is also the Shawshank model. Little hammer over 10 years does what a jackhammer for a day cannot.

It’s like how flowing water carves out grand canyons over millennia. Compare to say intense Hoover dam project.