Non-Linear Unstructured Research Time
Protect the wandering time — that's where the 1% watershed ideas live.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 75%
NZS Capital deliberately structures its calendar to protect large blocks of unstructured time for discovery rather than filling days with scheduled meetings and office politics. The team estimates that cutting meetings to just a couple per week frees up roughly 20 hours weekly, which they intentionally spend wandering through primary sources — industry trade conferences, obscure YouTube talks by executives, white papers — rather than analyst briefings. They accept that about 90% of this time produces nothing usable, 10% is genuinely useful, and only around 1% delivers a truly watershed insight (like discovering their Cadence thesis at a chip conference instead of an investor event). The framework's core insight is that breakthrough ideas can't be scheduled directly; you have to protect the time in order to occasionally stumble into them.
Origin
Emerged from NZS's own daily practice as a small, low-meeting investment team, contrasted with typical corporate schedules dominated by meetings and internal politics.
Core principles
- 01Breakthrough insights cannot be scheduled directly, only made more probable
- 02Minimize meetings and organizational overhead to free real research time
- 03Accept a high 'waste rate' as the cost of occasionally finding the 1% insight
- 04Favor primary sources (trade conferences, raw video, white papers) over curated briefings
- 05Non-linear time (open-ended wandering) complements linear time (focused deep-dive research)
How to run it
- 1
Audit and cut meetings
Reduce recurring meetings and organizational politics to a bare minimum — NZS aims for as few as two meetings a week.
- 2
Reclaim the freed hours explicitly
Block off the reclaimed time (roughly 20 hours/week) as dedicated, unscheduled research time rather than letting it fill with new obligations.
- 3
Wander without an agenda
Use the time to explore topics without a defined deliverable, accepting that most of it will feel unproductive in the moment.
Pro tip Expect roughly 90% of this time to be 'wasted' — that's the cost of finding the rare gems.
- 4
Mine primary sources, not curated content
Prioritize industry trade conferences, executive presentations, and raw interview footage over polished investor decks or sell-side research.
Pro tip Look for under-watched YouTube videos of executives speaking at industry events — they often contain far more signal than mainstream interviews.
- 5
Recognize and capture the watershed moments
When a genuinely new, thesis-changing insight surfaces (the ~1%), stop and formally document it rather than letting it pass by as just another data point.
In the wild
Instead of attending investor conferences, the NZS team spent early-2010s at chip industry trade shows, noticing Cadence and Synopsys were dismissed by the market as 'sleepy' companies.
→ The unscheduled research led to a decade-plus, highly profitable position in Cadence.
NZS discovered a Computer History Museum interview between Nvidia's Jensen Huang and TSMC's Morris Chang with only a few thousand views, packed with insight.
→ Reinforced their practice of mining under-watched primary-source video over polished PR content.
Common mistakes
Overscheduling Your Calendar
Filling all available hours with meetings and organizational politics eliminates the unstructured time needed for serendipitous, high-value discoveries.
Expecting Every Hour to Be Productive
Demanding that unstructured research time always yield insight misunderstands the process — 90% of wandering is meant to be 'wasted' in service of the rare 1% watershed idea.
Is it for you?
Best for
Knowledge workers, analysts, and researchers whose value comes from rare, high-conviction insights rather than routine output.
Not ideal for
Roles with tight, predictable deliverables where unstructured time isn't organizationally supported.
From the transcript
“how much extra time would you have in your regular job if you only had two meetings a week and you never had to worry…”
“we can wander around not knowing what we're doing and waste 90% of that time and 10% might be really useful and 1% might be…”
From the episode
Complexity Investing & Semiconductors (with NZS Capital)