The reading room · Digna Legi
Advice for time management as a manager
/100
80–100: high value. 70–79: worth the time. Below 70: below the usual publication threshold.
Evidence-reviewed score based on available publisher text. Evidence is complete enough for judgment, but advice is mainly management-practice oriented rather than research-backed.
Scores reflect one reader’s profile, not an objective quality rating. Best is a separate personal selection.
How scoring works →This brief · about 3 min with detail
Original article ↗ · about 6 min (text estimate)
Why read this
New engineering managers must stop optimizing for personal throughput and protect team output amid interruptions, delegation pressure, and blocked work.
AI brief · Checked against source text
The main idea
Kuhn argues that new engineering managers cannot keep using the individual-contributor model of picking one top task and grinding through it. The job changes because work becomes externally scheduled, frequently blocked, and measured through the team’s output rather than the manager’s own code. The practical answer is not heroic productivity, but calibrated expectations, ruthless prioritization, delegation that grows capacity, and protected deep-work blocks.
Go a little deeper
The first adjustment is emotional arithmetic
The author treats reduced coding output as a structural consequence, not a personal failure. Team responsibilities consume both time and attention, while inbound work makes weekly capacity volatile. The useful move is to plan individual engineering work as non-urgent: valuable if advanced, but not a dependency that derails other plans when firefighting or people work interrupts it.
Priority depends on consequence, not labels
Kuhn’s prioritization heuristics distinguish deadlines that matter from deadlines that merely exist. A deadline deserves weight when missing it causes concrete harm; otherwise, the manager should ask why it exists. The second major category is capacity-building work, judged by payback period: hiring, mentoring, automation, debt reduction, and pager relief are valuable because they increase future bandwidth.
Delegation is calibration, not abandonment
The essay’s strongest delegation distinction is between trust and under-management. Managers should explicitly negotiate how hands-on to be and match support to task-relevant maturity: the same design assignment can be reasonable for a senior engineer and paralyzing for a junior one. Delegation should also anticipate future growth, using stretch work to build capability before the manager becomes the bottleneck.
One-on-ones are early-warning infrastructure
The advice not to cancel one-on-ones is not sentimental. Kuhn frames them as the rare protected time focused on what reports need, rather than what the organization needs from them. Cancel too often and the communication channel degrades: people become less willing to raise difficult issues early, so problems surface later and more violently.
A case from the article
The overwhelm triage meeting
When the manager feels overloaded, Kuhn recommends scheduling the soonest possible meeting with the manager or primary stakeholder, listing every obligation, delegating whatever can be delegated, stack-ranking the rest, choosing a realistic cutoff, and telling affected people what will not happen. The case illustrates his broader point: overload is handled by explicit tradeoffs, not private anxiety or silent delay.
How the case is made
The case is made through practitioner advice adapted from an internal Wave management document, using concrete heuristics, examples, and checklists.
Where the idea has limits
The argument is addressed to team leads who still do some engineering work; its advice may fit less well once management is a full-time role with little or no IC load.
A question to take away · from Digna Legi
Which work on your list is important enough to own, but not urgent enough to endanger others if management interrupts it?
What the original adds
The source includes a fuller prioritization list, detailed delegation failure modes, and an overwhelm checklist with explicit steps for triage, stack-ranking, cutoff decisions, and stakeholder notification.
About this brief
AI-written, then separately checked for source support, useful detail and clarity. The author’s claims and our editorial question are kept separate. The original remains the author’s work. How we select and summarise →
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Digna legi. Worth reading.