What to do about time goblins
Photo by Magda Ehlers.
Earlier this week, we were at the gym. We've mentioned it before, but we are gentle gym people. Regulars, in that gym-time is an ongoing investment in showing up as our best selves. But not regulars like the people who camp out on the weight benches and stream their PRs. If that's you, good on you. That's just not us.
Whatever flavour of regular you are, this was the week of the New Year's Resolution Crush. Where you've never seen so many new faces, new sneakers, new GYMSHARK tanks, and new alo leggings. The thing that caught our attention was not all the newbies. That's common for early Jan. It's the enthusiasm the newbies were bringing to the whole thing. Not just showing up. But showing up and doing wind sprints between sets. Zero percent mad, newbie gym friends.
May 2025 be the year we all wind sprint toward our goals.
Sprinting toward our goals
We're back in front of computers for the first time in several weeks. And while the roiling mess of the world at large continues, a lot of leaders are coming back online feeling downright optimistic about work. This is particularly noteworthy when uncertainty is already out in front as the word-of-the-year for business reporters.
So much of the late fall, pre-holiday blitz is about getting to a clear plan. Particularly for our exec teams, getting to that clarity is often the grindiest of grinds. Complete with multi-hour strategy sessions conducted over Teams where the only facilitator is our collective will to end the meeting before it's pitch black outside.
But once we've got a plan and that plan is locked? We're in this rare and special place where the things that will pull us off-course haven't happened yet. We know where we're going. We know what we need to do. And the rest is just execution, goes the early Jan refrain.
This sounds pretty straight-forward as far as org-wide heroes' journeys go.
Getting over the first hurdle
Long-term gymrats will tell you that Jan is crowded but by late Feb, it empties out. That's not because the newbies stop caring about getting to the gym. It's that in early Jan, we have a plan. And by late Feb, the rest is just execution.
Businesses have all sorts of language to identify and dispel with execution risks. We talk about a need for focus. We talk about organizational drift. We say things are off-axis. Or misaligned. We do the hard work of strategy. Not only committing to what we will do. But also clearly articulating what we will not do. That's all well and good. And honestly, you can attend a lot of exec meetings with that script. Fold your arms, furrow your brow, and you might even get promoted.
Most senior folks worth their salt can spot where misaligned, garbage work is getting in the way of our strategic, aligned work. But it's not the only place orgs trip up. The part where we stumble and face-plant on the indoor track of corporate ambition is around the aligned stuff. The work we know is important and crucial. Because once it's clear we can't hit our big goal without this piece, we will spend an obscene amount of time trying to make the thing work.
Beware this mix: Matters to the business. Important to a big, top-line goal. Strategically aligned. And time goblins.
Time goblins are exactly what you think they are. They are people or teams (internal or external to your organization) who find a way to gobble up hours and hours (yours and theirs) without a lot to show for it. And the amount of energy you feed into the top of the sieve has no bearing on the quality or completeness of the resulting output or deliverables. In a normal situation, you'd put an end to it right quick. But time goblins are sneaky. And it can be tough to know whether one more conversation or one more clarification is going to be the thing that unlocks the whole of it. Which is why leaders often spend months in this unproductive, goblin-y configuration.
Anatomy of a time goblin
If you want 2025 to be a year where the goblins have less power over you, we need to get specific about where they come from and how they work.
So, okay. The core theory any time any organization hires anyone — employee, intern, contractor, law firm, outside agency — is leverage. We'd like to pay you do to this work, because it's a better choice than having one of us do it. "Better" can mean a lot of different things here. Better, because you lack skills that those people have. Better, because you want it arms-length, off-the-shelf, easy. Better, because you and your colleagues are all extremely full-up and would like to be able to sleep, or eat, or pee sometimes. Better, because you need help.
The people are manifold and complex and beautiful, but the core commercial exchange is very simple whether you're a tech company or a non-profit: you want to use some money to buy yourself some time. Yes, you'll have to find these people, hire them, onboard them, train them up, check in with them — you'll spend time on all that. But then they'll go and do important things. And that is where you get your payoff. Your time investment is multiplied. The hours you spend on onboarding or check-ins turn into weeks and months of productivity. It's a good deal.
That doesn't mean your people can't have questions. New hires are missing institutional knowledge that seems obvious until someone asks. Outside firms can't know the specifics of your preferences as a client and generally shouldn't guess. New problems can come up that need you to make a call. They ask, you answer, they get back to work. Still a good deal. So far so good, we know all of this.
Time goblins break the deal. They look like folks who just need a few more answers. But every question has more behind it, and more behind that. You end up pulled, hour-for-hour, into checking their work alongside them, or doing it yourself. The work may happen, but you don't get your magical multiplication effect. Time goblins are what we call it when the leverage deal collapses.
Calibrated for their level of expertise and cost, how many hours of high-quality, independent work do you get for each hour of time invested? A fresh grad might not do better than 4:1 in their first few months on the job — you might need to spend a full day per week with them just to get things moving. A more senior individual contributor will be north of 30:1, maybe twice that or better if they're mentoring other folks. A social media agency billing you for a five-person team ought to be delivering something like 150:1.
A time goblin is 1:1. Or worse.
There's no such thing as a goblin
We've been using the uncharitable short-hand of referring to these folks as time goblins, but people are people, not goblins. People aren't waking up looking to waste your time, or sabotage your goals.
"Time goblins" describes a dynamic, more than a person or a group. Specifically, the tell-tale signs of time goblins are:
People are working on a central, important thing
Those people have time-sensitive questions about that thing
Leverage has collapsed — your time invested is not buying you multiples in terms of productivity
Because the thing is important, you can't just ignore it, or push it off. Because the questions are urgent, you let them interrupt you and you prioritize fast answers. It's like someone hacked the Eisenhower matrix — everything is "Do first." And so now you find yourself so far in the weeds you have a sinus headache, and you can't even remember what it is you ought to have been doing. But you have a nagging sense that it was probably important, too.
The tendency of most bosses in this moment is to sink even deeper. You answer the questions the team asks, and then you answer the follow-ups. You're unblocking them, after all! Eventually, your shoulders sort of slump and you say, "one sec, let me pull it up on my laptop." Your people aren't trying to ruin your calendar, but they're also not going to say no to the free-answer store. In this moment, the time goblin is all of us.
The way out is counter-intuitive. The way out is to remember the deal. Take your hands off the keyboard. Pick your head up and put your shoulders back. Talk to the brilliant, curious, capable people you have entrusted to run with this thing. And say your version of,
"Okay, I think our next check-in should be on Friday. By then, I'd hope to see X and Y ready for final review, and the feedback on Z integrated. Is that fair, and do you have what you need?"
Most of the time, honestly, they'll try to ask more questions — the free-answer store is a hard one to leave. But if you keep yourself out of the weeds, they'll wrap it up pretty quickly. And in practice it really only ever goes one of a couple ways. Occasionally, you'll be disappointed. Some people oversell what they're capable of, really can't run with the task they agreed to, and need to be pulled off the work. It's rare, but it does happen, and it's worth some reflection on how you came to hand it to them in the first place.
But usually? 90% of the time or better in our experience? It just...works. Your people step up. They do the work. They flag a couple of their riskier choices in that Friday review to make sure you're cool with them. But fundamentally they understand the deal.
The rest is just execution.
— Melissa & Johnathan