Some people talk about how life has seasons, but I prefer the term phase transitions. Ice melts and turns into liquid – boom! The same substance suddenly feels completely different.
That choice of words is no accident. To me, “it feels different” is the most poignant, perhaps only truly correct, description of what makes a phase transition. You can’t even verbalize what it is without sounding preachy, or full of it, or eye-roll-inducing cheesy. You just have to live it, and then it makes sense and all the good advice comes too late, too bad. I’ll try anyway.
There’s another reason why I like phase transitions more than seasons. Unlike seasons, which come and go in a fixed sequence, phase transitions can come in any order, at any time, which also means we have control over them, at least sometimes. I suppose this is the real reason why I’m writing this article, to remind me and everyone else that phase transitions are a thing and life can feel completely different one moment to the next, for better and worse (there’s the cheese, don’t say I didn’t warn you).
For me, the most impactful phase transitions of my adult life have been becoming a parent and transitioning together with an early startup into a not quite so early startup. I’m mentioning those in the same breath not because they matter equally much, but because they happened roughly around the same time, and because the quality of the phase transitions is so similar it’s impossible for me to separate them.
It’s no secret that children, like companies, undergo phase transitions left and right. That’s not what I’m talking about. To me, the unexpected part is the phase transition that is forced upon the people going along for the ride, that is, the parent or engineer who suddenly has names below them in the org chart and has something to say about everything because they helped build everything.
Did you guess yet what the phase transition is? It’s going from having nothing but time to having no time at all, personally as well as professionally. Since this is a (mostly) professional blog I’ll try and stick to the professional side of things.
The curse: There’s disappointment everywhere¶
There’s simply more to do than hours in the day. More people who need your attention than attention you can give. More problems worth solving than you can possibly solve. Every “yes” to one thing is an implicit “no” to something else, and often that something else is a person who deserved better. Ring ring, reality called: The rules of the game changed, and it’s now zero-sum.
Before the phase transition, in the age of abundance, I could be everything to everyone in my small circle. I could respond to every message promptly, attend every meeting fully present, and still have energy left over to do the actual work and overdeliver. Now, I’m constantly triaging. The colleague who needed a thorough code review gets a quick skim. The coworker who wanted to float some ideas by you gets rescheduled. The kid who wants to play gets “just five more minutes” while I finish one last email.
You learn to live with the low-grade guilt. You learn to apologize gracefully, and mean it. You learn to forgive yourself for being finite. But it also means that every day is a little bit uncomfortable, and you need to get used to that. But where there’s discomfort, there’s also growth.
The blessing: Everything you do matters¶
When time becomes scarce, what you choose to do with it becomes meaningful by definition. You can’t waste time on things that don’t matter because there’s no time to waste in the first place.
The result is that you end up doing more good, meaningful stuff than you ever did when time was abundant, precisely because of the constraints.
When you have unlimited time, every problem looks worth solving. Every rabbit hole looks worth exploring. Every refactor looks worth doing. When you have no time, you develop a ruthless filter. Some problems solve themselves if you ignore them long enough. Some “critical” tasks turn out to be entirely optional. Some meetings could have been emails, and some emails could have been nothing at all.
Here’s the funny thing: I used to be a major procrastinator. Early on I learned to combat this with concurrency and task switching. When I got bored with task A, I’d go to B, then C, then D, then back to A. The phase transition turned this coping mechanism into a superpower. Now B, C, and D are likely just as important as A. The backlog is so deep that even procrastination is productive. In many ways I feel much more content with my output now than I ever did before.
The shape of time changes¶
Before the phase transition I perceived time as hairless and undifferentiated. I could think about a problem whenever I wanted. My brain was always on, processing in the background, making connections.
After the phase transition, time develops texture. There’s work time, family time, chore time. Each has its own character and constraints, and some of these boundaries are sharper than others. I can’t process a technical problem while reading a bedtime story, and I owe others being present during quality time.
This is not to say I don’t think through a design decision while going on a walk or folding laundry or, to hell with it, kicking a ball in the park. The daily chores (and sometimes boredom) of parenting make for decent background processing time. What’s changed is that the transitions between modes are more abrupt, the context switches are harder, and their bite stings a little more.
Leverage becomes everything¶
When you can’t do all the work yourself, you become obsessed with leverage. To me this means constantly zooming out when most others are zooming in. The team is losing too much time manually bumping dependencies? Let me quietly write a bot on my own time that cuts that friction in half, then roll it out once it’s ready. Just explained a difficult concept to a colleague and I like the ring of my own words? Put it into a blog post and share it with the team.
This is where the transition from individual contributor to leader becomes most palpable. You stop engaging with every problem and start creating environments where problems get solved without you. Your individual contributions matter less than your ability to multiply the contributions of others. The technical skills that got you here are still there when you need them, but you catch yourself reaching for a different skillset more often: communication, prioritization, creating clarity.
Finding equilibrium¶
Phase transitions eventually reach a new equilibrium. Water doesn’t keep boiling forever. Ice doesn’t keep melting. You find a new normal.
For me, the new equilibrium looks like this: I’ve become comfortable with being uncomfortable. I’ve developed new skills to survive and thrive in a resource-constrained habitat. I’ve learned to delegate not just tasks but also trust. I’ve accepted that some things I used to do well, I now do adequately, and that’s okay.
The new equilibrium also means recognizing that both phases have value. The early days of having unlimited time, of being able to go deep on problems, were necessary to build the foundation of who I am and what I do best. The current phase of having no time is necessary to scale that foundation into something bigger.
And here’s the thing about phase transitions: they go both ways. Ice can melt, and water can freeze. The busy season will eventually yield. The startup will mature, the kids will grow older, the calendar will loosen. Until then, I’m here for the craziness one day at a time.
Different properties, same substance.