YC Startup School Notes: How to prioritize your time
Table of Contents
- Time burns money, and money is the very basic thing that keeps startup alive
- You need to be really good in identifiing and analyzing high importance tasks
- there are 24 hours in a day, everyone has different situation, but we need to allocate the time here somehow
- Excercise
- Family
- Friends
- Hobbies
- Sleep
- Startup
- Real vs. Fake progress
- Easiest way to classify it I should do smth or not
- seems trivial at first, why would anyone do smth that is not real progress?
- Primary KPI: Revenue / Active users
- You should always set weekly goal for primary KPI
- Talking to users
- Building the product
- NOTHING ELSE
- Fake progress
- Winning awards
- Conferences
- Lots of advisors
- Pitch competitions
- Press announcements
- Forbes Everyone Under 30
- Networking events
- Twitter activity
- Meeting famous people
- Optimizing BS metrics
- It should be about delivering real value to users, not Delivering points to your ego
- Task prioritization
- it’s easy for low value work to creep into your work
- Experiment: try journaling every hour what is it you are doing - be honest with what you expect the impact will be and what it was
- we tend to be as humans on autopilot - we are not minding where we invest the time. We love to cross the stuff out of todolist
- log tasks in spreadsheat - it should be either in category Talking to users or Building the product
- Dimensions
- Impact of weekly goals: high, medium, low
- Complexity: Easy (less than day), medium (few days), hard (many days)
- Very common mistake tech founders do is build things first and talk to users later.
- Example tasks in table
| Task | Impact | Complexity |
|---|---|---|
| In-person demo to 10 warm intros | High | Medium |
| Video demo to 10 customer leads | Medium | Easy |
| Add chat widget to website | Medium | Easy |
| Cold email 1000 potential users | Medium | Medium |
| Get feedback from users re: big feature X | Medium | Medium |
| Improve website copy | Low | Easy |
| Re-write section of code for better speed | Low | Hard |
| Coding for big feature X | Low | Hard |
- sorted by impact and complexity, you should do the high impact and easy first, than high impact and medium
- You do not want to focus on the low things - no point do to hits
- Focus on High/Easy, High/Medium
- Avoid Low/Hard, Low/Medium
- Don’t do too many things at
- How well am I prioritizing?
write weekly updates
- Primary KPI (Actual vs Goal)
- Biggest obstacle to growth
- Tasks accomplished + impact
- Big learnings
Once in a while you should review your weekly updates
- Learning fast?
- Predicting impact well?
- Low value work creep in?
- Consistent blockers to growth?
- Completing tasks in timely manner?
If you are always running out of time to complete tasks, two suggestions:
- maybe task is too big and need to be break out into smaller tasks
- your schedule needs to be rigid a little bit
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
- context switching is expensive - you are wasting time. You need continious chunk of time.
- week divided into 2 days, coding days and meetnig days
The art of moving fast = decisiveness
- at the beggining of your startup, you want to prove as fast as possible you are building smth users wants
- you should be okay to make a bad choice fast, and learn from it fast