Today, someone privately emailed me asking if I could help solve a problem. I ignored it. Later, he reached out again via WeChat. I knew I could probably give him the answer in five minutes, while it might take him an hour or two. But I resisted the impulse of “it’s no big deal, just five minutes.”

Is It Really Five Minutes?

• The messy reality: Under normal circumstances, yes, it’s five minutes. But as I mentioned before, the defining characteristic of data in the asset management industry is that it’s “fragmented, volatile, and messy.” New edge cases can pop up at any time, and before you know it, you’ve spent an hour just tracking down the root cause.

• N times five minutes: Things rarely end there. Since he doesn’t fully understand the matter, every follow-up question that arises will land on your desk. And since you were so “accommodating,” he’ll come to you for the next thing too.

• The pain of recollection: Weeks or even months later, he suddenly asks about something from before. By then you’ve long forgotten the details. To recall why you did what you did, you have to dig through old emails or scripts – and there goes another half hour…

The “Five Minutes” That’s Never Just Five Minutes

This reminds me of a passage Paul Graham wrote in How to Make Wealth:

Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load a problem into your head. So the cost of having someone from personnel call you about a form you forgot to fill out can be huge.

This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare when you interrupt them to ask a question. Inside their heads a delicate structure is being carefully assembled, and your interruption just caused it to collapse.

Just having to go to work everyday in an environment where interruptions are common makes it impossible for hackers to work on hard problems. This is why hackers tend to work late at night, and why it’s impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night).

This matches my own experience: complex work often requires an hour or two of deep thinking before you can untangle the problem and begin to solve it. Your “five minutes” can wipe out an entire hour of mental loading I’ve done. Given that uninterrupted blocks of time are already scarce during the workday¹, that hour of focused thinking is truly precious to me².

It’s Not That Important

Have some faith in others – with enough effort, they’ll build the capability eventually. Besides, what’s the worst that happens if this particular problem goes unsolved? The sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. The earth will keep spinning. We’re all seasoned professionals; people can always find a way to manage.

Solve the Important Problems, Not Just the Immediate Ones

These are the cruel statistics of extreme poverty. Perhaps people think it is inhumane of me to overlook individual dying children in front of me to focus on hundreds of dying children I cannot see.

When I feel that way, I always think of my former supervisor, Ms. Russell. She had worked for many years as a church nurse in the Congo and Tanzania. She always said: “In extreme poverty, you cannot and should not strive for perfection. If you do, you are stealing resources from where they are needed more.” When we concentrate too much on the visible few at the expense of the invisible many, we end up pouring resources into a small subset of problems and saving only a small number of lives.

This principle applies to all situations where resources are scarce. When it comes to saving lives, it’s hard to talk about resource allocation because it makes people think you’re cold-hearted. But as long as resources are limited, we need to think hard about how to use them most effectively. That is true compassion.

– Hans Rosling, Factfulness

The “crying baby” won’t necessarily starve. And even if it would, there’s only so much I can do: when I spend large amounts of time on trivial matters, I lose the ability to focus on systemic, important problems – and with it, the opportunity to help far more people.

In the End

At its core, the inability to say no stems from caring too much about how others perceive you – an unwillingness to make others feel uncomfortable or to seem uncooperative, which unconsciously drives you to maintain that “illusory nice-guy image.”