Effort has ROI. Yours might be negative.

Everything requires effort. There's a cost to showing up, caring, trying.

You're going to pay that cost no matter what. That's non-negotiable.

The only question is what you get for it.

Most people never ask that question, so they make the worst possible trade: they spend their effort on things that produce nothing.

Sunday night dread about Monday. Commute rage. Meetings about meetings. Scrolling through other people's victories. Protecting a comfort zone that's actually a cage.

The cost is fixed.

The return is entirely up to you.

The Energy Audit

For the next seven days, track something nobody tracks: where your effort is actually going.

Every time you feel that familiar tension—the presentation prep, the sprint planning grind, the Sunday night planning—note what triggered it, how much energy it took (1-10), and what it produced.

After seven days, the patterns become clear.

That three hours of anxiety about your presentation? Maybe it landed, maybe nobody noticed.

The energy you spent in back-to-back meetings? Kept the machine running.

The Sunday night dread? Produced nothing. Just consumed you.

But here's the thing: that same energy, pointed somewhere else, could be building something real.

The Reallocation

Here's the unlock: you don't need more hours or more energy. You just need to redirect what you're already spending.

Your effort falls into four buckets:

Maintenance — Meetings that keep you employed. The commute. The politics.

Growth — Learning skills. Building side projects. Hard conversations that move you forward.

Spinning — Worry about things you can't control. Replaying past decisions. Anxiety about hypothetical futures.

Others — Staying late to fix someone else's mistake. Projects that make your boss look good. Meetings because someone might be offended if you don't show.

For most people in tech, the split looks something like:

• Maintenance: 40%

• Growth: 10%

• Spinning: 35%

• Others: 15%

You're already putting in 40+ hours of effort per week. But only 10% is building anything that compounds in your favor.

The other 90%? It evaporates the moment it's spent.

What Growth Actually Looks Like

This is where it gets exciting. That "Spinning" energy—the 35% going nowhere—could be funding any of these:

Build something small. A simple tool that solves one problem you have at work. A Notion template. A spreadsheet that automates something tedious. Ship it in a weekend. See if others want it.

Start writing. A LinkedIn post about what you actually learned this week. A newsletter about your niche expertise. A Twitter thread breaking down something complicated. You don't need an audience to start—you need to start to get an audience.

Learn the skill that doubles your value. AI prompting. Data visualization. Public speaking. Sales. Pick the one that would make you dangerous in your next role and spend 5 hours a week on it.

Talk to customers. Not for your company—for your future company. Interview 10 people about a problem you think you could solve. You'll learn more in those conversations than in a year of hypothetical planning.

Build in public. Document what you're learning, building, struggling with. The accountability keeps you going. The visibility attracts opportunities. The content compounds.

Consult on the side. You have expertise someone will pay for. One client. Five hours a month. It's not about the money (though that's nice)—it's about proof that your skills have value outside your current employer.

None of these require quitting your job. They require redirecting energy you're already spending on worry, dread, and other people's priorities.

The Swap

Start with your "Spinning" bucket. That 35% producing nothing.

Take your biggest block of wasted energy—for most people, it's Sunday anxiety or the daily commute—and replace it with Growth energy at the same intensity.

If you spend five hours every Sunday anxious about Monday, replace it with five hours of building something. Use that same intensity, but point it somewhere productive.

Sunday becomes your creation day. The commute becomes your learning lab.

You're not trying to work harder. You're trying to get better returns on the effort you're already putting in.

The Multiplier

Advanced move: stack multiple returns from the same effort.

Your 90-minute daily commute becomes time for customer discovery calls. Recording content for your newsletter. Listening to the audiobook that levels up your thinking. Drafting LinkedIn posts in your notes app.

Same time block. Four different returns instead of zero.

There's also a premium for building in public versus building in private.

When you share what you're working on—tweeting your progress, writing about lessons learned, documenting your journey—your effort becomes an asset that appreciates.

It builds credibility. Creates a network invested in your success. Generates content that attracts opportunities. Provides accountability that keeps you going when it gets hard.

The same amount of effort, made visible, compounds in ways that private effort never can.

That PM who posts about their product thinking on LinkedIn? They're getting recruiter DMs while doing the same work as everyone else.

That engineer who open-sources their side project? They're building reputation while solving their own problem.

That marketer who writes about what's working? They're becoming the expert while learning.

Your 7-Day Sprint

Day 1-3: Track where your energy goes. Note what triggered the effort, intensity, duration, and what it produced.

Day 4: Calculate your distribution across the four buckets. Be honest about how much is Spinning.

Day 5: Pick one Growth activity from the list above. The one that excites you most. The one you'd actually do.

Day 6: Design the swap. Which Spinning block will you replace? When exactly will you work on your Growth activity?

Day 7: Execute. Replace one block of wasted energy with one block of building.

Then repeat next week. And the week after.

Small swaps compound. In 90 days, you'll have a body of work. In a year, you'll have options you don't have today.

The Bottom Line

You're going to put in 40-60 hours of effort per week regardless. That's 2,000-3,000 hours per year. Over a career, 100,000+ hours of energy spent.

You can spend it maintaining someone else's dream or building your own.

You can spend it in meetings about metrics you don't care about or talking to customers about problems you're solving.

You can spend it asking for permission or creating things that don't need approval.

The effort is already being spent. The only question is what you're building with it.

A year from now, you could have a newsletter with 5,000 subscribers. A side project generating revenue. A skill that makes you un-ignorable. A network that opens doors. A portfolio of work that proves what you're capable of.

Or you could have another year of Sundays spent anxious about Monday.

Same energy. Completely different outcomes.

The arbitrage is right there. Take it.

~ Warbler