Thanks to those of you who tuned in to my first live, either on the day or on catch-up. I plan to do more of these in future.
You can also catch me talking with Chad and Steve from “Can I get that software in blue?” podcast about AI, fractional work and the unexpected perks of Oxford college football (or soccer to our American cousins).
For many of us, time is money.
We are paid for the hours we do.
On some level, we know this isn’t accurate - as knowledge workers, the value we create isn’t linearly tied to time.
You might have a million-pound idea in the shower.
You might sit at a desk for eight hours and produce nothing of real worth.
Yet in most companies, you’re paid the same either way.
Maybe when it comes to performance reviews or bonuses, those outsized contributions help your case.
But good luck seeing more than a tiny sliver of the upside you’ve delivered.
This misalignment gets worse with AI.
If I’m paid to work 9 to 5, but I can get all my work done by 10, then… what am I being paid for?
Cue fear, denial, and resistance to tools that should be liberating, not threatening.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
As a fractional CTO, I charge based on the slices of the CTO role I’m fulfilling: not on the number of hours I’m clocked in.
Sure, there’s some time commitment and availability guarantees, but fundamentally, I’m being paid to deliver outcomes, not for the number of hours I sit at my desk.
AI tools are allowing me to write emails, craft documents, and run analyses faster and more comprehensively than I ever could have before.
The quality of my work hasn’t dropped. In many cases, it’s improved.
I remain accountable for the work I produce.
That makes my fees make sense: the outcomes I deliver are tied directly to business value.
And the time I save? I get to keep it.
When time doesn’t equal money, everybody wins.
Historically, they put profit first.
The problem of course is that outcomes always partly depend on the environment, which means you never have full control over the outcomes. If the outcome is negative because of some black swan event, what will you do? Will pay the company back some of what you earned before?
This is of course the typical problem with "performance pay" of the executive team. When the outcomes are good, they "earned" their bonuses. When the outcomes are bad, it's somebody else's fault. Executives only win. They never lose.