Play Time is Work Time
Last week, I read Chris Miller’s Chip Wars, which describes the history of the microchip and how vital it’s become to international relations. One anecdote, about Texas Instruments researcher Jack Kilby, stood out.
“Kilby arrived in Dallas [for his first day at TI] around the company’s July holiday period, yet he’d accumulated no vacation time so he was left alone in the lab for a couple of weeks. With time to tinker, he wondered how to reduce the number of wires that were needed to string different transistors together.” The result of that tinkering was the idea to assemble components on the same piece of semiconductor material—the integrated circuit or chip. “When his colleagues returned from summer vacation, they realized that Kilby's idea was revolutionary.”
That anecdote stood out to me because, as I mentioned last week, I’ve been building an app for our operations team. It’s nowhere near as revolutionary as Kilby’s breakthrough, but it came about under similar circumstances. Students and teachers are off for the summer, of course, but there’s also a two-week window where nearly every other leader is off too. The exception is the operations team, which uses that stretch to paint, clean, upgrade buildings, refresh tech devices, and knock out projects to get ready for the next school year. So while everyone else was away, I had two weeks without the normal chaos of school operations and almost nothing on my calendar. That created the conditions to explore something new.
I had no intention of building anything in those two weeks, but as if it could sense the upcoming freedom, my mind shifted into play mode, ready to make something with all the observations and ideas already swimming around in my head. The raw materials were already there; it just took time and the right mindset to turn them into something useful.
Given our organizational push to adopt AI, I wrote up a description of how I’d built the app with the help of Claude and shared it with others. In response, someone asked how much time I spent on it. I was surprised by the question—mostly because I hadn’t thought to track it. “Real work time,” I said, “or mess-around time? 😎” The effort was fun because I was playing, and I didn’t mind the dead ends and mistakes because they were part of the learning process.
It’s hard to replicate Jack Kilby’s first weeks at TI, or the summer break conditions of a school calendar, but we can control something smaller: whether the people around us think an afternoon spent messing around is time well spent.
Play time is real work time. Taking 20 minutes to mess around with a new tool isn’t a waste; it’s a learning opportunity. And ultimately, every learning effort is inefficient—the first time we do something always takes more effort for less impact than subsequent effort.
If those of us who are leaders aren’t willing to accept those inefficiencies, and if we’re not willing to show everyone how we gladly “waste” time for the sake of learning, it’s unlikely that our teams will successfully adopt the conditions and mindsets needed for innovation.
Many of us leaders say we want innovation on our teams, but people need both the time and mindsets to make innovation a reality. And surely having enough time is critical to getting in the right mindset. It’s hard to replicate Jack Kilby’s starting a new job while everyone else was on vacation or the summer break conditions of a school calendar, but every leader can send the right signals about what’s an “appropriate” use of time.
Play time is real work time. Taking 20 minutes to mess around with a new tool isn’t a waste; it’s a learning opportunity. And ultimately, every learning effort is inefficient.
If we’re not willing to accept that among our team—and if we’re not willing to show them how we “waste” time for the sake of learning—we’re not really serious about innovation.