How to Prioritize Time & Work

TIP: Beware of Fake Progress, actions that may give you more eyes or legitimacy, don't actually move the needle of progress for your team in the near future, and thus shouldn't count as "progress".

Examples include:

  • Winning Awards
  • Optimizing BS metrics
  • Meeting Famous People
  • Pitch Competitions
  • Press Announcements
  1. Decide how much time per week you have to dedicate toward your mission
    • This gives a weekly budget from which you can prioritize your time
    • As an individual, your time should be divided among 6 things:
      1. Family
      2. Friends
      3. Exercise
      4. Hobbies
      5. Sleep
      6. Mission
  2. Determine your Primary Metric or Primary KPI (see Section below)

    • Measuring Startup Success

    • In short, should be related to either revenue or active users, and should be accompanied by weekly goals to hit
  3. Build a spreadsheet from all your current tasks, and categorize them
    • All tasks should be divided into 1 of 2 categories: Talking to Users, and Building Product
    • Continue to add and categorize idea's as they come to you, but you don't necessarily have to prioritize or execute on them immediately
  4. Grade your tasks based on impact towards your weekly goal (which should come from your Primary Metric)
    • You can use the following grades: High, Medium, Low
  5. Grade your tasks based on their degree of complexity
    • You can use the following grades: High, Medium, Low
    • High: Not sure if the task can be finished within a single week
    • Medium: Task can be completed in a few days
    • Low: Task can be done in a day or less
  6. Organize your tasks based on impact and complexity
    • High impact, low complexity should be at the top, low impact high complexity should be at the bottom
    • Favor impact over complexity, so high impact medium complexity would be above medium impact low complexity