Runtime
Time spent executing tasks, fighting fires, reviewing outputs, and attending meetings. Produces returns in a single period. Necessary but should not dominate a leader's schedule.
Why It Exists
The distinction gives leaders a measurable ratio. If the number is moving in the wrong direction, you are trading compounding returns for single-period returns.
Rosetta Stone
Four circles, four readings of the same object. Each role reads the artifact through its own lens.
OpEx. Single-period return. Necessary but should not dominate a leader's schedule. A CTO who is 100% in meetings is running 100% OpEx on the company's most expensive asset.
Execution hours - running the playbook, reviewing outputs, attending meetings, fighting fires. Valuable but not compounding. The ratio to compile time is the management diagnostic.
Runtime. The hours spent operating the system, not building it.
Per-invocation cost. Amortized over the lifetime of the compile-time artifact, its share of total cost shrinks as the artifact is reused.
Related Terms
Compile Time - Time spent building systems, frameworks, rubrics, and processes that produce returns across many future periods.