Snacks are cheaper and tastier than ever

Perhaps the single most consequential essay I've read is Will Larson's Work on what matters. This is ostensibly advice targeted towards staff engineers, but the content generalizes across disciplines. One of the failure modes he talks about is snacking: If you're in a well-run organization, at some point you're going to run out of things that are both high-impact and easy. This leaves you with a choice between shifting right to hard and high-impact or shifting down to easy and low-impact. The latter choice–easy and low-impact–is what Walk refers to as snacking. When you're busy, these snacks give a sense of accomplishment that makes them psychologically rewarding but you're unlikely to learn much from doing them, others are likely equally capable of completing them (and for some of them it might be a good development opportunity), and there's a tremendous opportunity cost versus doing something higher impact. As my role as a founder has shifted to be more explicitly managerial over…