The other day I was asked if I was worried about uncertainty. This was asked in the context of some ambiguity in our 2025 plans at work. Here I just want to share some of the thoughts on the topic.

My answer was: “A person has to be a psychopath to not worry about uncertainty at all. We, as humans, seek safety and security. At the same time, the biggest of our successes come from uncertainty and taking risks.” (*)

Not knowing what to choose is one big source of uncertainty and anxiety, the drain of indecision takes out your energy and you get stuck in dreaded “analysis-paralysis” . The reason for this seems to be our nature of being afraid to lose something, even if it is a prospect of future opportunity. For instance, you might have a possibility to get promoted in the current team, which you will lose if you switch to another team.

Do you know the origin of the word “DECIDE” ? It’s from Latin decidere which combines two words: de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’. Yeah, to decide, we have to cut off something.

I took some risks (changing jobs, moving countries) in the past and believe I was rewarded for taking them and had some failures in other cases (financial setback on home purchase). I was wondering if there is a sure way to deal with the feeling of uncertainty and that grueling waiting time between making a decision and knowing the outcome of that decision.

Taking inspiration by thinking about people who dealt with risks and uncertainties isn’t always helpful. Popular culture is overhyping people who succeeded by taking risks – please know that for every single billionaire out there who miraculously made their startup successful there is an ocean of people who failed. Survivorship bias in play (**).

Thinking about people who have to deal with major uncertainties right now doesn’t help either. For instance, many of my fellow Ukrainians face uncertainties of the unthinkable levels, they lose homes, jobs, loved ones, and the future is unclear. Objectively my uncertainties compared to theirs are negligible.

Rolling up the sleeves and just getting into the flow of work and just being in that mode of constantly solving problems and mitigating risks helps as long as you can maintain that state. I see this as a mode of “fight” in a survivorship physiology (***) – fighting is cool and can get you far, it’s just that sustainability is difficult.

It appears that the easiest to deal with uncertainty is multi-fold: having a very solid safety net, having a streak of risk-reward successes that gives you confidence boost (think of emboldened territorial lobsters (****)), and actually enjoying the process itself. But all in all, you just have to embrace the uncertainty as something natural and impossible to avoid. Absolute 0 uncertainty means you are dead – I will get to it.

There is this concept of the cone of uncertainty often used in  risk management. The idea is fairly simple – as the time passes more and more risks are either realized or mitigated and eventually residual risk reaches near 0. In the context of project management this happens closer to the project end. I have joined many projects where it was absolutely unclear what I had to do and how the things will evolve, few months in and it gained some structure in my head, few more months and there is a feeling of being on top of the things, and eventually few more months in it is all done and ready and you are on the outlook for the next big thing. So, my friend, don’t worry, embrace the uncertainty and deal with ambiguity, as they say.

In our lives the moment we are born the uncertainty of what will come of us is the highest and as the time passes we become who we are today with the uncertainties of today. Now to sound overly morbid, we reach a personal level of 0 risk at the time of our death! So enjoy non-0 risk and uncertainty!

There is more to come ;)

What are your thoughts on risk, decision making, and uncertainty?

In the past I wrote a few posts on learning, specifically this one, where I talk about the learning pyramid in which teaching someone has the highest retention rate followed by practicing what was learned, followed by other methods of learning (visual, audio, reading). I also have a quick overview of a book “Learn Better” in which the key premise is that learning is a skill you can teach yourself to be better at.

Not long ago I was also asked if I have a learning system. I don’t. In fact, I clearly remember how inefficient I was at learning in university by trying to memorize some mathematical proofs instead of properly understanding them and recreating when needed.

So what a good “learning system” could look like?

Purpose and Value

I think a key to good learning is genuine interest in the topic you are trying to learn. Interest could be internal curiosity or simply seeing value in learning something specific. To give few specific examples:

• I rock climb as a hobby. As such, taking outdoor courses, reading books on climbing just comes naturally for me and I don’t have to force myself to.
• After joining Google I had to refresh my rusty C++ knowledge, so I had somewhat practical motivation to learn/refresh knowledge, but it went well.
• When I moved to Austria I had to learn some German, but it really was forced on me and I didn’t make much progress, but did minimum for required paperwork.

What to Learn

Now, if you are intentional about learning, say for your career, probably the first question you have to ask yourself is “What should I learn?”. These days the amount of information and resources available is just incomprehensible to our brains. As such, being selective and strategic is important. Think what would make most sense to learn in your specific situation so that there is purpose and value for you.

Deliberate Practice

The highest retention of knowledge is when you teach someone or immediately practice what you have learned. I always like to think about learning as neural pathways in your brain, when you consume new information you stimulate only one direction of storing the information, but when you practice something or try to teach someone you stimulate and reinforce the retrieval direction from the storage. 

If I had to create a learning system, I would prioritize practicing as much as possible. The fastest way to learn might be to learn “on the job”, but if this is not possible, the next best thing might be to set SMART goals (you know the drill).

Consistency

One issue that comes up with learning something is sticking to the plan. Consistency is hard, it really is. For myself, I found that accountability, periodization, and re-inspiration are the best ways to stay on course. This weekly blog post writing is part of accountability I have. I try to re-remind myself why I’m learning something and also trying to get inspired by other folks.

Summary

So what does my learning system look like? 

• Purpose: Genuine interest or practical need.
• Focus: Be selective and strategic in what to learn.
• Practice: Teach or apply knowledge to retain it.
• Consistency: Use accountability and inspiration to stay on track.

What would your learning system look like?

This post is original content by Andriy Buday.

NOTE: I wanted to gather my thoughts on the topic of “deep work” before going through the book “Deep Work” which I just picked and started listening to.

When and where are you the most productive? Does it ever happen to you that in a few hyper-focused hours you can complete as much as in a few days of ordinary pace work? Do you think it is possible to make these hyper-focused hours happen regularly every day?

Shallow Work

In the past I could be really focused on simpler, somewhat repetitive work. I remember I once had to add some extra data to our database and pull it through all layers and get into the frontend. Typically in that project this would take a week or so, but because I did this so many times one evening of hyper-focused work was enough and the PM who requested this was super surprised “you are very quick” with big eyes. Occasionally this looked like I was an overly competitive person. I remember at my first job I got an assignment to create some medical forms. I was maybe 2-3x faster in creating them compared to a more tenured person. I didn’t compete, it was just focused and fun work to me. This type of work is something you can grind through if you have a looming deadline.

Deep Work

But what about the work when more deeper thinking is required? It’s normally harder or next to impossible to bluntly grind through. It’s different in a way that any distraction derails the train of thought. Imagine, you are writing a design document, and you need a bit of extra info, so you search for that info, and a few dozen browser tabs away you realize you no longer remember what you were looking for and what you are doing on this particular page and that now it’s time for your meeting on another topic. I see deep work as periods of intense uninterrupted focus when I can make major progress on something hard to do.

Ideal span of focused time

For me ideal stretches of focused time are always longer than 30min and shorter than 3 hours. I found that getting into the deep work requires “warming up”, pretty much like in sport activities. After that, maintaining intensity is easier but never lasts longer than 4 hours, after which productivity goes down rapidly.

Mental capacity

There is limited mental capacity available on any day for deep work. I imagine it as a capped reservoir. The only way to have it full is to be well rested (proper sleep night before, healthy body and mind). Working in focused mode is like directing the flow to harvest energy on what you need. Distractions are like huge leaks that take time to fix. The reservoir is very hard to expand, but you can train to make use of the flow much faster without the lag time, so instead of requiring 30 min to get into the focus you might train to shorten this time.

Environment

Another aspect of focused work for me is the surrounding environment. I am working on creating routines. Say, to write blog posts I decided to do them in a bubble tea place each time after dropping off my kids for karate classes. I know I have an hour of active work and there will be very little time during the week to get most of it done, and then one more stretch of work early on Saturday or Sunday morning. This post is written in three one hour sittings.

Distractions

Going through social media feeds on mobile phones is an obvious time and attention killer. But even something that is more important and you have to do has detrimental effects. For instance, just 4-5 meetings are normally enough to exhaust mental capacity for any deep work on that day, especially if they are spread throughout the day. Or, say, replying to messages from your boss is something important, but again if it comes in the middle of your deep work on, say, writing an important doc you lose your attention and will have to get into the flow of writing again. Small things often go a long way to reduce distractions, things like putting the phone away, having a clean work desk, using full screen mode, etc, whatever works for you.

Time of the day

A “cheat code” appears to get those 3 hours of work before any meetings. I know it is a cliche to say “wake up at 5AM and get most work done before others wake up”. I found this to be true, except it doesn’t work for me mainly because at 5AM I’m a zombie and not a human (maybe if I was a robot it would have worked ;) ). This works though if I go to bed at 9PM, which is super difficult as even my kids laugh at me when I mention going to bed this early.

Commitments

I mentioned deadlines at the beginning and I think they are a very important motivating aspect for actually getting into the deep work. A caveat that comes with deadlines is that often they are perceived as something far in the future so we tend to procrastinate until its too late. Thus, something that works better are shorter cycles. For me, weekly cadence seems to be the best, both in my personal life and at work. For projects that I drive at work I usually establish a weekly cadence of planning/commitments. I have written about setting up challenges with friends and I’ve been doing this in one or the other form since 2016.

Key contributors to focused work for me:

• Plenty of sleep the night before
• Distraction-less surrounding environment
• Very early hours (or very late hours)
• Dedicated spaces for specific types of work
• Having a goal for each session
• Commitment of some sort (work deadlines, self-goals, promises)