There is a calculation that throws me off balance a little every time. The average human life lasts about four thousand weeks. Oliver Burkeman even named a book after it. Four thousand. Subtract childhood, sleep and old age, and far fewer working weeks remain. That is not as many as it seems when you are twenty-five with "a whole life" ahead of you. When I first did this calculation, I looked at my task list with completely different eyes. Half the items on it suddenly seemed not just optional but insulting to my own life. This article is about pragmatism, but it is more honest to start with finitude, because pragmatism without an awareness of finitude turns into dull penny-pinching, while with it, it becomes a form of self-respect.
Life is short if you stretch it thin
Almost two thousand years ago Seneca wrote a treatise "On the Shortness of Life", and its central idea sounds remarkably modern. Life is not short, he wrote, we make it short by squandering it on things that do not matter. We guard our money and property but hand out our time generously to anyone who asks. Replace Roman senators with participants of endless calls and banquets with a social media feed, and the text could be published in any business magazine without edits.
In development and business this squandering looks very concrete. Features built "for the future" that are never used. Meetings after which nobody knows what was decided. Reports nobody reads. Polishing an interface that will be redone in a month anyway. Each of these on its own seems trivial. Together they eat up years.
What pragmatism really is
To many people the word "pragmatist" conjures up a dry person who measures everything by profit and cannot dream. I understand pragmatism differently. It is the ability to choose the shortest path to value and not get distracted by scenery. Not the cheapest path, and not the fastest at any cost, but the shortest path to what truly matters. A pragmatist can dream about very big things. They simply do not spend time on what does not lead there.
I have a simple question I ask clients when yet another "just in case" feature appears in a specification: who will use this in the next three months? If the answer is "nobody yet, but it might come in handy later", I suggest postponing it. Not throwing it away, but writing it down on a list of ideas. The future we prepare for almost never arrives in the shape we imagined. And the time spent preparing for it cannot be returned.
Every yes to something secondary is a no to what matters, only said quietly and without witnesses.
There is another observation that real systems confirm again and again. When you look at how people actually use a program, it turns out they spend almost all their time in a small part of its features, while the rest is opened rarely or never. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed a similar unevenness back in the nineteenth century, and it has been found almost everywhere since. A pragmatist draws a simple conclusion from this: put your effort where people actually live, not where it looks good on a diagram. Everything else can be added later, if life really asks for it.
Finished beats perfect
The finitude of time changes how you think about quality. While time seems endless, you want to do everything perfectly, to polish, redo and search for the best solution. Once you realise time is limited, it becomes clear that finished work is worth more than perfect unfinished work. Van Gogh created around nine hundred paintings in a career of about ten years, and he wrote to his brother that the old masters worked fast, laid the form on the canvas at once and, if it worked, left it alone. He did not wait for a perfect state, he worked as if time were short. As it turned out, it really was.
In software this means it is better to release a small but working product and get a reaction from real people than to spend years building a perfect system nobody will ever see. At Ingello we have built a whole approach on this: in Fractal a system is described and the generator produces the code, the database, the API and the admin panel. Not because we dislike manual work, but because we do not want to spend human lives on what a machine can do. People's time is needed for what a machine will not do: understanding what is actually worth building.
The irony of the mission
There is an amusing contradiction here that I cannot help pointing out. Ingello's mission includes radical longevity and technical immortality. In other words, we are essentially working on making time less finite. But until that problem is solved, the only reasonable strategy is to behave as if time were short. Because it is. And paradoxically, it is precisely pragmatism about time that gives you a chance to live until the moment when there is more of it: less burnout, less empty fuss, more strength for what truly matters.
What to do tomorrow
Take your list of current tasks and projects and ask yourself one question: which of these would I keep if I had half the time? Mark those items. You do not have to throw away the rest, but admit honestly that it is the second tier, and do not let it eat the first tier's time. Then look at your calendar for next week and find at least one meeting or one task that exists only out of inertia. Cancel it. That will be a small but very real victory over squandering your own life.
