What Can't Be Compressed

Take the bigger role, and you miss things at home you don't get back. Turn it down, and you spend the next year watching someone else do it worse.

Chase the money and the years go to the work. Put family first, and some part of you is still running the numbers or comparing.

Rest, and it feels like falling behind. Push, and you feel the wear.

Ask for help and something in you logs it as weakness, though you'd never run that logic on anyone else. Say nothing, and you carry the whole thing alone.

Whichever way you move, it costs you something. And doing well hasn't made the feeling go away for me.

You can be successful by any measure you'd have accepted ten years ago and still feel like you're getting it wrong in four directions at once.

Every one of those is a trade. You move something from one column to the other and call it a decision. None of them creates anything. Which is why, when someone tells you there's a move that creates rather than trades, you lean in. You were trained to.

This has a name, and it is better documented than I expected. Ask people across a hundred and thirty countries how satisfied they are, and the answer sags in the middle, bottoming out somewhere around forty-seven. Some of you know it as the Sandwich Generation, or the Midlife Squeeze, the years when the kids still need you and your parents start to as well, and the two arrive at the same time.

I'm not in the middle of that curve yet. Maybe just close enough to see it coming, and close enough to start wondering whether the equipment I've been assembling for it is up for the task ahead.

Ray Dalio recently released a short video on it, outlining three moves.

Meditate, so you have the calm to see clearly. Work out who you want around you, and lean on them. And get leverage. Don't think about what to give up, he says. Think about how to get more out of an hour than you did before. Do that well and you get more life out of life.

It's the third one I realize I went for first. Of course it is. Leverage is the one we already believe in, the one an entire career runs on. Efficiency. Optimization. It's also the only one of the three that sounds easiest to measure and to get results from.

This year I've rebuilt how I work around exactly that, most of it AI-assisted now. It took months of real effort before it returned anything. Work I'd have blocked out a week for now lands in an afternoon.

Then I looked up and my weeks were just as full.

What happened is that going faster is enjoyable. There's a real hit in watching effort collapse like that, and that hit has nothing to do with whether the thing was worth doing. So you do another one.

The time I'd freed didn't sit there waiting to be spent on my life. It went straight back into more work, and it felt good the entire time.

As quickly as I freed up time, I filled it. Not with the highest-value things, but with whatever came up next, or whatever Claude suggested next. I would truthfully feel a bit fried by the end of the day.

Some of you are reading this thinking the answer is just to do less, and I've tried that. It doesn't hold past about a Tuesday for me, anyway.

Here's what I think is tough about the squeeze. Your life gets split into two halves that run on completely different rules.

One half can compress: analysis, admin, meetings, coordination, all the machinery of getting things done, and this year it got much faster.

The other half does not compress and never will. Sitting with your kid doesn't get more efficient. Neither does supporting a friend going through something, nor a parent in the season when the time left is finite, and you both know it. There is no process improvement for those hours.

They cost exactly what they cost.

Leverage only touches the compressible side. It hands you back hours and has no opinion at all about where they go, and the compressible side is right there, rewarding, and always willing to take them back. That isn't a failure of discipline. It's what happens by default.

From my chemistry days, I often think about how work is a gaseous property: it will expand to fill the space you give it. And if you're somewhere where hours are the product, you know this one, where the gain never returns to you at all. It gets absorbed, and the absorbing becomes the expectation. It's truly never enough.

So the only version that pays is compressing on purpose. You get faster at the half that can be made faster so you can afford the half that can't, and you allocate the hours before they exist, because unassigned time doesn't stay unassigned for long.

You already know how to do this. Nobody schedules over a flight. If you're in the air at nine on Thursday then you are not available at nine on Thursday, and you don't apologize for it, or try to move it, or feel you should have found a way around it.

That kind of immovability is something you already know how to grant. The standing dinner with your partner could have it. The weekend with family could have it. The only question is what else you are willing to give that status to.

If your hours aren't fully yours right now, the same move works on a smaller scale. The half hour before the house is up. The evening you hold for no reason you're willing to explain. Harder to protect, and still decided in advance, because the day won't offer it.

Which is where the other two moves stop looking soft. The calm in the morning is how you make the allocation before the day starts pulling at you.

The man telling you to get leverage sits still first, twenty minutes at a time, to think about where to get the most leverage and why, and apparently has for decades.

I've been bringing that into my own mornings, a short sit to anchor on what actually matters that day before ‘plugging into the matrix.’

It has helped a surprising amount. No enlightenment (yet), but I can state my goals and my intention for most days now, which I could not reliably do before.

And the people close to you are how you find out you've drifted, because they can read the shape of your last two months in a way you can't from inside it. Y’all are the best!

So this week, one thing rather than a list. Pick something in your life that can't be compressed and give it the hours before anything else gets to ask for them. Then notice how hard it is to leave them alone.

Until next Sunday,

Eric

P.S. I'm curious what people actually protect. If there's something in your week you've made genuinely immovable, and it held, I'd like to hear what it is and how you defend it. I'll take the good ones and write about them.

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