Priorities

Dear Toby,

In any early-stage startup, it’s normal to feel like most things are broken most of the time.

Your job isn’t to solve all the problems.

Your job is to make your company successful.

That means you need to figure out which problems are survivable, which are potentially fatal, and prioritise accordingly.

Most problems can wait. Or, as Reid Hoffman puts it, ‘let fires burn’.

You know this is correct on an intellectual level. But living it is a different matter.

Despite your best efforts, your to-do list and calendar will get swamped with customer calls, investor emails, prospecting, sales calls, office admin, HR issues, events that need to be planned, marketing content that needs to be written…

What to do?

You have two challenges:

1. Identify one or two priorities; and

2.  Only work on those things

How to identify which problems to prioritise

First, recognise that you can only really have one or (max) two priorities at any time.

You think you can juggle more than this. You’re wrong, you can’t.

When Peter Thiel was CEO of PayPal, he refused to discuss anything with his employees that was not the one thing they had been tasked with solving. If a team member brought up something else, he shut down the conversation and walked away.

Don’t kid yourself. If your list of priorities includes more than two items, you have not thought hard enough about what really matters.

Your performance will suffer as a result. Be ruthless about it.

Second, identify your priorities…

I’ll save you hours figuring this out.

As an early-stage founder, you should focus on:

1. Getting new users

2. Making your current users incredibly happy

Each of these priorities hides many sub-tasks…

To get new users you could post on social media, send cold emails, run paid ads, knock on doors, pitch to resale partners etc.

Once again, you need to focus on one or two things.

Be aware of your own psychological traps. Since the path forward is unclear, you will tend towards doing things that are fun or exciting, despite them not being the shortest route to achieving your top level priority.

Watch out for this.

Prioritise things that give you the fastest and most direct path towards your top-level priority, especially if they are off-putting because they are hard or dull to work on.

Complete tasks before starting the next one on your list.

Better to have two experiments completed and to know the results, than many experiments left half-finished and sidelined when new ideas pop up.

How to not get sucked into other things

As Jocko Willink wrote: discipline equals freedom.

To remain focused on your top priorities you must turn off distractions. 99.9% of issues that arise during the work day can wait.

Reactivity is a productivity killer.

Block out large chunks of time on your calendar every day to focus on your top priorities.

During those times, quit Slack and turn off notifications. If you are doing solo work (vs. meetings with others) put your noise cancelling headphones on and play some repetitive music to increase your focus.

Aim for 80% of your working day to be spent working on tasks related to your top priorities.

Until next time,

Toby