The Operating System
11 Compounding Play

Optimize the Year, Not the Day

Direction dominates speed: spend disproportionate effort choosing what to work on, and guard your judgment from the last person you talked to.

The right goal is to allocate your year optimally, not your day.

Altman’s Productivity essay inverts the usual advice: the gains from doing the right thing dwarf the gains from doing things fast. “It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction,” he writes, so the highest-leverage work is choosing the direction, then protecting that choice from drift.

The mechanics are mundane on purpose. Constantly rewritten priority lists, the hardest work done first, and ruthless nos to everything else. He adds a warning against being too suggestible: “If you find yourself always agreeing with whomever you last spoke with, that’s bad.”

Doesn’t transfer to people without optionality. Allocating your year “optimally” assumes you get to choose what you work on. Employees and early-career people frequently don’t. Their year is allocated for them. This is founder-and-investor advice wearing the clothes of universal advice, and the freedom it presumes is itself a privilege.