Rough fermi on how much time I expect to spend on this:
I spent about 12 hours on the investigations of the last round, and about 2 hours a week since then on various smaller tasks and discussions about potential grantees. I spent less time than I wanted to since we made the first round of grants, so I expect to settle in at something closer to 3-4 hours per week. I expect this will be higher than the other fund members.
In the long-run I expect that the majority of time I spend on this will be in conversations with potential grantees and the other members of the fund, about models of impact of various types of projects, and long-term future strategy in general. I think I would find those conversations useful independently of my work for the fund, so if you are interested in net-costs you might want to weigh that only at 50% or so. Though I am not even sure whether the net-cost for me is negative since I expect the fund will be a good vehicle for me for me to have more focused conversations and modeling about the long-term future and I can’t come up with an obviously better vehicle to do so.
So, in terms of time I will spend doing work that is related to this fund, I expect to settle in around 3-4 hours per week, with peak periods of about 15 hours per week about 4 times a year. Though how much of that is counterfactual and whether I experience any net cost is unclear, probably at least 20% of that time is dead-loss in terms of boring logistical tasks and other things that I don’t expect to gain from much long term, but I also expect to gain at least some benefit from being on the fund and the opportunities for learning it will open up for me.
Is there anything the EA community can do to make it easier for yourself and other fund managers to spend more time as you’d like to on grantmaking decisions, especially executive time spent on the decision-making?
I’m thinking of stuff like the CEA allocating more staff or volunteer time to helping the EA Funds managers take care of lower-level, ‘boring logistical tasks’ that are part of their responsibilities, outsourcing some of the questions you might have to EA Facebook groups so you don’t have to waste time doing internet searches anyone could do, etc. Stuff like that.
Rough fermi on how much time I expect to spend on this:
I spent about 12 hours on the investigations of the last round, and about 2 hours a week since then on various smaller tasks and discussions about potential grantees. I spent less time than I wanted to since we made the first round of grants, so I expect to settle in at something closer to 3-4 hours per week. I expect this will be higher than the other fund members.
In the long-run I expect that the majority of time I spend on this will be in conversations with potential grantees and the other members of the fund, about models of impact of various types of projects, and long-term future strategy in general. I think I would find those conversations useful independently of my work for the fund, so if you are interested in net-costs you might want to weigh that only at 50% or so. Though I am not even sure whether the net-cost for me is negative since I expect the fund will be a good vehicle for me for me to have more focused conversations and modeling about the long-term future and I can’t come up with an obviously better vehicle to do so.
So, in terms of time I will spend doing work that is related to this fund, I expect to settle in around 3-4 hours per week, with peak periods of about 15 hours per week about 4 times a year. Though how much of that is counterfactual and whether I experience any net cost is unclear, probably at least 20% of that time is dead-loss in terms of boring logistical tasks and other things that I don’t expect to gain from much long term, but I also expect to gain at least some benefit from being on the fund and the opportunities for learning it will open up for me.
Is there anything the EA community can do to make it easier for yourself and other fund managers to spend more time as you’d like to on grantmaking decisions, especially executive time spent on the decision-making?
I’m thinking of stuff like the CEA allocating more staff or volunteer time to helping the EA Funds managers take care of lower-level, ‘boring logistical tasks’ that are part of their responsibilities, outsourcing some of the questions you might have to EA Facebook groups so you don’t have to waste time doing internet searches anyone could do, etc. Stuff like that.