# Don’t confuse space and time.

<https://www.cjchilvers.com/blog/dont-confuse-space-and-time/>

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- Saved: September 28, 2026 (2026-09-29T00:51:46Z)
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## What Jamie wrote

This line from this article is one of the most important design considerations that nobody ever thinks about enough:

> Time matters more than space.

Back in my MarketWatch days I remember our team being frustrated that we had fewer stock quote lookup page views compared to the likes of Yahoo! Finance. Our page "loaded slower" so they came to the tech team with a request to "make it faster". We had already optimized that page like crazy and it was fast, but we also just had a lot of "stuff" on it. The reality was that Yahoo! Finance was sending out about 80% fewer bytes of data than we were for the same thing. That meant our page loaded 5x slower than theirs. And we had fewer page views.

A user doesn't spend "5 page views" with you; they spend 3 minutes or the time it takes to do a task. You get to decide with your design and features how hard or easy you make that.

Always optimize for time!

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT352: WT352 — Interviewing Otto for the Job](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/352/), Notable

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cjchilvers.com/blog/dont-confuse-space-and-time/