Founding and the Ranatunga Principle

It is not often that you are in a job where you can own your own time. You ought to take advantage of such situations.

Over the weekend I was reading this blogpost by David Epstein (or Range fame), where he interviews Cal Newport (of Deep Work fame) about his upcoming book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

There was this one paragraph that caught my attention. This is Newport speaking:

Throughout all of human pre-history, as well as most of our more formal economic history, we had variations in the intensity of our efforts. This changed with the introduction of mills and factories where, for technological reasons, it made sense to just work as hard as you could, as long as you could, all year long. This was so taxing that we had to invent labor unions and entire new regulatory frameworks to try to make it tolerable. But then when knowledge work arose as a major sector in the mid-twentieth century, we basically said, “let’s do the factory thing!” Which is all to say, knowledge workers would be happier and more effective if they could enjoy more variation in their intensity at various time scales.

I very strongly empathise. If I think back at the most productive time of my life, it was in the 2011-20 period when I was running my own analytics and data science consulting, and apart from that, wrote a newspaper column, wrote a book and taught at an elite business school.

I was doing so many things, and yet, had all the time for myself, and that is primarily because I was working on my own time. There were days when I’d work late into the night. There were long lunches and teas with friends and acquaintances.

I worked primarily from home, except for client visits. Back then, there were almost no video calls. I’d stack up meetings with various members of client teams and then visit in person, finishing the lot of it in a “sprint”. And then come back and chill.

The Ranatunga Principle

Long ago, I had come up with this concept that I call the “Ranatunga Principle”, named after the former Sri Lankan cricket captain, who led his country to a spectacular victory in the 1996 World Cup.

What Ranatunga looks like now

The defining image I have of Ranatunga from that World Cup is nudging the ball down to third man and “walking a run”. He was portly, yet fit, and not afraid of diving when required. But the key to note is that he would only run, or dive, when absolutely required. Else he would just walk.

When you don’t really need to run, just walk
- Ranatunga Principle

It is another way of putting what Newport says in his interview above. Basically, especially when it comes to “knowledge work”, intensity varies, and it varies wildly at different time scales.

For example, I’d written a couple of months ago about doing “non technical sprints”, where, as part of building my company, I take up one kind of activity and do it intensely for a short period of time. And then take a break.

Within this sprint, there are further sprints. Like last last Friday, which was the second day of meeting venture capitalists, we had four meetings (with different potential investors). The following Monday, we had one (and that too on Zoom). Yesterday, for example, we had an open first half, and four meetings in the second (one of which ultimately got rescheduled)!

Fractal Time

Maybe the only book (apart from my daughter’s story books) that I’ve read four times is Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)behavior of Markets. Without delving much into any maths, and very little graphics, Mandelbrot beautifully brings out how markets work (and don’t work).

Towards the end of the book, he talks about this concept of “trading time”. Putting it simply, there are times when nothing happens and there are times when everything happens. Trivially, there is a lot of trading that happens in the first and last hour of each trading day. The middle of the day is relatively barren. Actually you need to read the whole book.

And fractal time is absolutely key to knowledge work. Like I mentioned above, there are days when you do a lot and days when you do nothing. And the same applies in terms of hours (and maybe even minutes).

This ties in very nicely with what Newport has said in the interview I started this post with - it is highly unnatural to work at full intensity for long periods of time. What the Ranatunga principle basically says is that when the market slows down, you should also slow down - there is no reward to going full throttle at those times.

Hustle and sprints

Now, this goes against the “hustle” culture that is so glorified in the startup sphere (which I’m now part of). I spoke to a founder 2-3 weeks ago who proudly told me that everyone in his senior leadership “works 60-70 hours a week”. Hustle is basically about going full throttle even when the market doesn’t demand it.

Again there are two ways to look at it - the way I (and Ranatunga) see it is that I should conserve energy for times when it is actually needed. The “hustlebro” way of looking at it is that if you drop your intensity any time, you won’t be able to draw upon it when it is most needed.

The concept of trading time is also linked to sprints. I’ve spoken about this a fair bit - I don’t like sprints, the way they are generally implemented in agile software engineering teams. My biggest problem with sprints is that you are forced to work according to the schedule set by the person who designed the sprint. By having to do “something” in each sprint, you are effectively creating busy work, and trying to go full throttle even when the market doesn’t demand it.

It is for the same reasons that I dislike “daily standups” - again, you end up inventing work on days when there isn’t that much to do.

What this means as a founder

Fundamentally, as a founder, I don’t have the concept of work hours. I should fundamentally be able and willing to work at all times of the day or week. However, the important corollary is that with great responsibility comes great power - while I need to be available to work at all times, I don’t necessarily need to work all the time.

Every time I’m in a job (however briefly), this is something that I need to unlearn when I leave - that if you are not in a “factory like” job, there is no concept of working hours any more.

So long lunch and tea breaks, and meeting people during “work hours” is something you absolutely need to do - when you are working for yourself all of these are features and not bugs. Things like startup events perform the same function - yes, those are hours you are spending not building, but you don’t need to be building all the time (else you can get into headless chicken mode).

Basically you can take advantage of the fact that everyone you “owe” (pun intended) is separated from you by a contractual relationship, and so they don’t own your time. It is only when no one owns your time that you realise the inefficiencies of someone owning your time!

That said, ever since I rediscovered the Ranatunga Principle, which was some one or two weeks ago, I’ve started making a conscious effort to obey it. On a lot of days, I have work meetings till about the afternoon, and then again late in the night (to talk to people in the US), and I just come back home early. Between meetings, I spend time reading blogs and watching YouTube videos - again I’m someone who can solve problems better when I take my mind off the problem. I was in one part of town for a meeting, and used that opportunity to catch up with an old acquaintance who is also in that part of town (and who has also started up).

It is not often that you are in a job where you can own your own time. You ought to take advantage of such situations.

Sometimes it is just okay to walk.