Seconds to Strategy: How Your Relationship with Time Shapes Your Career

We all have a different relationship to time.  And you should design your life in accordance with how time influences your decision making.

There are five types of time:

1. Micro Time (sub-second)

2. Engagement Time (Seconds)

3. Business Time (Minutes to Hours)

4. Strategy Time (Days to Weeks)

5. Big-Thinking Time (Months to Years)

One's career choice should be optimized to the timescale to make the most effective decisions.  The goal is to be honest with yourself about where you make the best decisions relative to the rest of the world … and how you can leverage that in your career.

Micro-Time: Sub-Second Decisions

Some decisions need to be made in a fraction of a second.  

Great athletes need to make lots of micro-second decisions. They usually cannot wait to process all the information. They need to make superb decisions extremely quickly. Think of the court awareness and the behind-the-back pass in basketball. Ultimately, a lot of their decision making is pattern matching and muscle memory. 

Athletes, some soldiers, fighter pilots, video game players, speed-chess, and many other professions need excellent micro-time skills.  

Speed is paramount.  And while you make a lot of mistakes moving so fast, the goal is to make fewer mistakes than others.  Practice, practice, practice is really important – because you need muscle-memory to make decisions in less than a second.  

Younger people certainly have an advantage in micro-time. Your synapses are firing faster. Caffeine really helps too.  There are many studies that show actions-per-minute (APM) decrease dramatically as people age. Professional videogamers make 600 actions per minute (10 per second)…and they skew very young.

Engagement Time: Making Decisions in Seconds 

Are you great at debate?  Can you give a presentation off-the-cuff?  Are you witty and can quickly banter with someone else?  Can you throw in a great pun or one-liner?    If so, you excel in Engagement Time.

Professions that are good here are anyone that is interacting live with people like certain types of salespeople, radio or TV (or podcast) interviewer, improv comedy, momentum traders, some trial lawyers, and and even some medical professionals like ER doctors.  

These are people who think fast on their feet. Most job interviews are geared toward people mastering this level of time.  So many companies end up hiring people that fit this category even though making decisions in seconds is not core to most jobs.  Redesigning a job interview to fit the decision-time of the job is very important and is an area where many companies can improve.

Business Time: Good Decisions in Minutes to Hours

In this timeframe, you have a bit more leeway to consider your decisions, but still need to act relatively quickly. 

These are people who need to make important decisions with limited information.  That means that the cost of making no decision is usually higher than the cost of sometimes making the wrong decision.  

Most core business decisions fall into this category.  Executives, operators, managers, etc. often fall into this category.  

On a personal note – I’d put myself in this category.   It is kind of a tweener – not great at making REALLY fast decisions and not deep-thinking either.  

Strategy Time: Taking Days to Weeks to Make a Decision

These are good fits for anyone in “strategy.”  That might be a strategic planner – like the Chief Strategy Officer, someone that oversees FP&A, a CFO, architect, stock picker, venture capitalist, equity research, blogger, etc.   

These people can spend a lot of time reading, processing, reviewing.  They can spend a lot of time in a spreadsheet.  They tend to be very analytical.  And they have a need to be correct – they are usually less comfortable with getting things wrong.   They err on getting-it-right over doing-it-fast.  

These people make very few decisions a month and so they need to be correct about the decisions they make.  They are not often amazing managers but can learn to be.  

Big-Thinking Time: Making One Correct Decision

These are the big thinkers.  The long blog posts – like Tim Urban – that come out with a very big idea – and often have just one key idea per year.   These also include the academics and the deep thinkers and the philosophers.  

If you are in a PhD program and do NOT think you are in this category, you probably should quit the PhD immediately.  

People like Yuval Noah Harari, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, and Jared Diamond fit this category.  Many big thinkers talk very slowly. When speaking, some mumble and have lots of ummmms. But they write very coherently.

In my experience, people who fall into the long-time decision-making category often have the most profound conclusions...but also have a hard time changing their mind when they are wrong (likely because of the sunk cost of the work that went into making the decisions in the first place).

Stimulants can lead to increased performance.

For people in Micro-Time and Engagement Time, uppers like caffeine or Adderall can make people think faster on their feet. Think of stand-up act of Robin Williams while on cocaine. A lot of successful stock traders have a massive stimulant addiction.  Many people in professions that require very quick decisions are extremely reliant on uppers (like caffeine).  

Big-Thinkers can rely on downers – like alcohol, marijuana, hallucinogens.  They definitely do not benefit from uppers (except in the case where they are inspired and want to stay up all night).   They are optimizing for creativity and seeing things that others do not see.

Trust your gut?

If you are one of those people that has a great "gut", you likely should be in a career where quick-time decisions rule.  The more you trust your gut, the more you should choose a profession where you are making decisions quickly.  

How you should spend your time depends on what type of career timescale you are optimizing for.

The longer the timescale you are optimizing for, the more you should spend reading (and gathering information). The shorter your timescale, the more you should spend doing (for muscle memory).

Job interviews are overly optimized for quick-time decisions.

If you are selecting candidates for a job, you need to understand what timescale the job fits into. Most job interviews are not designed to let people think about a problem for a few minutes and then respond. Awkward pauses are penalized. Most job interviews are optimized for quick-time. So if you are recruiting for a position that has a longer timescale (like for a global macro hedge fund), you almost certainly should send candidates the interview questions in advance and let them come up with the right answer).

HT: special thank you to Rajal Patel, Karyn Gibson, Jeff Lu, and others for their feedback.  

This is an expansion of two posts: How do decisive people think? and What career should I choose? that were originally on Quora.