by @abhia90 // newsletter // youtube

https://youtu.be/XcCmMOWuAF4

YC Partner Adora Cheung shares her framework for how founders can efficiently make use of their time. She covers ways to identify and prioritize tasks, in addition to how you can measure their impact on your company.

• Note: watch Adora's lecture on KPI's first —> 7. How to set KPIs and Goals
• tldr; Time is scarce; Realize the high opportunity cost of your startup, so you need to know how to prioritize your time
• Your priorities will (probably) include: Exercise, family, friends, hobbies, sleep, Startup
• Real vs Fake Progress— helps clarify if a task is "Should do" vs "Should not do"

  • Ask yourself, "Does this contribute to real startup progress?", "Does this move the needle forward?" —> ie GROWTH (which is usually your main KPI) or active users

    • This usually consists of 1) Talking to users (helps you figure out your product's roadmap) and 2) Building product (delivers a solution to the user to see if it translates to more customers & revenue)
    • Remember, your goal is to deliver REAL value to the customer

  • Fake progress = anything NOT dedicated to Growth or Increased active users

    

Task Prioritization

• Run an Experiment: Journal in great detail every day in the past week every single hour what you actually did. Then analyze and ask how much of it contributed to your primary KPI —> this is painful to do (emotionally), but you'll prob see how much low value work you were doing
• Log every idea you come up with into a spreadsheet (note: don't act on the idea, just write it and save it for later) —> Then once a week go through this list and grade the old and new items on how impactful the task would be on achieving your weekly goal for your primary KPI
  • Break tasks into High probability, Medium probability, Low probability

    • Ex:

      

      So you can see, Medium is necessary to do, but it's one step away from actually landing customers

    • Break tasks within the Same Category into different levels of complexity (Easy (can do in <1 day), Medium (takes 1-2 days), Hard (2+ days, usually >1 week))

      

      • Focus on High/Easy, then High/medium, etc
      • DON'T do too many things at once— means you won't be able to complete the tasks with much conviction, and makes it really hard to show progress week-to-week

How do I know if I'm making progress?

• Remember the growth curve. Remember that it's not going to be smooth.

• Doing your weekly reviews (see Adora's KPI lecture)— make them very detailed

  • Primary KPI
  • Biggest obstacle to growth
  • Tasks accomplished + impact
  • Big learnings

• After a while, sit down and review a few weekly reviews and ask yourself:

  • Do you feel like you're learning fast enough?
  • Are you accurate in your prediction of the impact of the tasks?
  • Do you let low value work or fake progress creep into the schedule?
  • Are there any consistent blockers to growth carrying over week-to-week?
  • Are you completing tasks in a timely manner?
    • If you're not completing your tasks on time or running out of time, ask yourself 2 Qs:
      • Is your task too complex? —> if so, break it down into medium and easy tasks
      • How does your schedule look? —> might need to revamp it (see "Maker/Manager schedule" article by Paul Graham)

        • tldr; there are high switching costs to different types of tasks (ex: switching from Coding to then Talking to users)

        • SUPER IMPT FOR SOLO FOUNDERS

        • Can break schedule down into days (1 day for coding, 1 day for talking to users)(or, half day for each)

        • Also can read Deep Work by Cal Newport

          https://youtu.be/KX_2a_jsGYw

• The art of moving fast = Decisiveness

  • The faster you can move, the faster you can prove that your product is something that people want, or the faster you can pivot into something else
  • You will make mistakes, and that's okay/expected. It's how fast you learn from them and iterate.

  The key is to be okay with making a wrong choice, and learning fast.

OKRs?