The Joy of Missing Out.

Dispatch · to the desk of one working leader

The Joy of Missing Out.

The observation

Somebody catches you on the way out and tells you it went well.

You say that's great, because it is. They give you the short version standing up, thirty seconds, and they're pleased with it. There's a call in there that went a way you might not have chosen, and it worked.

And somewhere in the middle of being pleased for them, there's a half second you'd rather not have had.

You didn't know it was happening. It was settled in a meeting on Tuesday that you weren't in.

It was on a list somewhere, it moved through the ordinary channels, and it reached everyone it needed to reach. That's the entire story.

But in that half second a small question starts to form about why this is the first you're hearing of it, and you can feel it looking for a sentence to live in, something reasonable that sounds like interest.

You let it go. You tell them well done, and you mean it.

Then you think about it again in the car.

The pattern

For most of a career, being across everything took real hours. You read late, you sat in the room, you asked around, and the people who managed all of it were usually the people who cared most. Being needed everywhere became an honest reading of being valuable, and for a long time the two were the same measurement.

What changed is the hours. AI took the writing-up, the summarizing, the chasing, the assembling of what everybody already knew, and it handed that time back. Generously, and to almost everyone at once. It's the first real surplus most leaders have been handed in a working lifetime.

So there's a question about what the hours get spent on, and a larger one underneath it. Your worth was never in how much reached you. It's in how much no longer has to.

The old measurement rewarded presence, and the pull runs that way, toward being in more places. The spend worth making is the one that leaves you needed in fewer.

And look at where the work actually slows. It slows where something finished sits and waits, for a view, a nod, a signature, a Thursday. Every one of those pauses is friction, and every one is there because a decision still belongs to somebody who isn't in the room. Trust is what takes them out, and you can see it in the record as an absence: the pause that didn't happen.

Anil Dash put the phrase down in July 2012, as an answer to the fear of missing out. That term is older than people assume: Patrick McGinnis coined it in 2004, in a humor column in the Harvard Business School student paper, and by 2011 it was everywhere. Dash wanted a name for the opposite feeling.

"There can be, and should be, a blissful, serene enjoyment in knowing, and celebrating, that there are folks out there having the time of their life at something that you might have loved to, but are simply skipping."

Read that as a leader and it lands somewhere else entirely. The joy on offer is hearing that something went well and knowing you had no hand in it. The word Dash reaches for is celebrating.

Gavin Slemp and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Motivation and Emotion in 2018, drawing 754 correlations from 72 studies and 32,870 people. Leaders who support autonomy have teams that report higher engagement, better well-being and less distress, and the result held across countries.

Empowerment has a price on the other side too. A decision that's really theirs is one they can't hand back on the Thursday it turns, and some people will want to. So the half second in the car is a list of what you're still carrying for somebody who's ready to carry it.

Hold this line

The question will arrive sounding entirely reasonable, and it will sound like interest. Being told after it went well is the evidence you were looking for.

The move

Take one thing that still comes back to you and give it away with the deciding attached.

The work has been theirs for a while. The part to hand over is the point where it stops and waits, and you'll know it when you find it: the status update that exists so you can say yes, the draft that sits in your inbox for two days before anything moves. The sentence that hands it over is short: "This one's yours end to end. I'd rather hear about it when it's finished."

Then let it be done that way, including the version you'd have built differently. Reopen it once and the sentence becomes decoration, and you'll spend a long time earning it back.

They'll come back once, early, to check that you meant it. That's the moment the whole thing turns on. Say it again, shorter.

You'll hear things later than you're used to. You'll give up some of the pleasure of being the one who settles it. And for a while you'll know less about your own operation than you're comfortable knowing, which is a discomfort about how you have been seen.

What you get is the other half of what Dash was writing about. The hours are yours, and so is the evening.

You don't need direct reports for this. If something stops and waits for you, it's yours to hand over.

The work that still reaches you is the work that still needs you.
The joy is in how much of it does not.

Which meeting would carry on perfectly well without you in it? And what else still comes back to you that does not need to? One line on either. I read every reply.

See you Tuesday.

Rui

P.S.  Worth your margin: Anil Dash's original post from 2012. Short, written about a city rather than a job, and still the clearest thing anyone has put down on this.

If someone came to mind while you were reading this, send it to them.

Someone forward this to you? Margin. is free, five minutes, every Tuesday.