Personal KTLO
What is KTLO?
If you are working in tech or are close to its jargon, you know what KTLO refers to. For others: It means “Keeping the Lights On”., that is, activities that are so critical for your business that you cannot not do them. Think of it as the activity of monitoring API traffic, fixing high-priority defects that come up during the course of business, etc.
In an offline world, this could be about ensuring your assembly line isn’t stuck anywhere, having a person at the checkout counter of your retail outlet etc. Basically, for you to continue your business, you just cannot avoid these activities. In the retail outlet example, you could skip having a salesperson and have no one to help answer customers, but you simply cannot avoid the person in the checkout counter.
As critical as KTLO is, if a business/team does only KTLO activities, they will lose out to competition pretty fast. And/Or become commodities that can be replaced easily by someone else. Steady degeneration would ensue. Even the motivation to do the KTLO activities would go lower and lower. The business/team should strive to get efficient at KTLO, keep the bandwidth towards it limited, and spend time/energies on other activities that let them flourish (as individuals, and as a business). Call it ‘innovation’.
What is ‘personal’ about it?
While that is about business (where a group of people work together), there are also similar activities for us as individuals — The ‘Personal KTLO’. Just as in business, these are activities you cannot choose to ignore: From the basic ones like eating, sleeping, shedding bodily fluids of various kinds regularly, and going slightly higher to brushing, exercising, cooking, doing dishes, washing clothes, cleaning the house, etc.
Unless you are one of those people who have a purpose in life, whose personal ambitions and work are so tightly intertwined, your occupation/profession might as well be KTLO, as far as your life is concerned. You could be a student, a knowledge worker (who is not?), a non-knowledge worker at a business, run your own business, be an entrepreneur, freelancer, be a full-time parent, or even a house-spouse, there is KTLO to what you do. For your life, your whole work related activities could just literally be KTLO, to pay the bills. To be able to do anything in life beyond the KTLO needs intentional and focused effort. Else, you will end up as a commodity. Not necessarily ‘replaced’ (whoever replaces a father, for example), but rendered increasingly useless and a notional figure. Worse, if you cannot be replaced, you will be an unnecessary burden on others.
So?
By default, our brains assume that we can do nothing about KTLO activities, as they are so critical. This happens at businesses (a constant source of tension between business and engineering teams), but also at a personal level. For example, you might consider cooking to be so critical for the family, that you need to spend 4 hours a day on it, and nothing less than that. You might think of reading news as so critical for you being up-to-date that you need to spend 2+ hours a day doing it. (Okay, the last statement was more note-to-self). You might consider your work-life to be so critical to put food on the table, that you spend all energies there, leaving none for parenting. While you can’t reduce the time you spend at work, you could spend lesser energy at the office by, say, spending lesser time in water cooler gossip.
Think of Elon Musk & Twitter. He appears to be the worst manager one could ever have. But: The service itself is running as usual (and with increased traffic during the football world cup) at < 50% of employees it had before Elon. And they are actually shipping new features. Painful to know, but that is real. No?
On this new year day, this is some g̶e̶n̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶n̶u̶d̶g̶e̶ exhortation from me: Do an Elon in your personal life. Think about the personal KTLO activities of yours, strive to get efficient at them, keep the bandwidth (time/energy spent on it) to the minimum, and start thinking about what else you could do for flourishing as a human. Whatever flourishing means to you.
Wish you a happy 2023. (Hope you read this before the end of the year. Else, wish you a happy whatever year you read this at).
PS: If you are here after some cunning and shameless marketing shenanigan by me through WhatsApp status: Be informed that I also send out a (of course free) newsletter called “Brain Ticklers”. It is liked (or told so) by all my intelligent friends:
