How to Prioritise Your Time — Lessons from YC Adora Cheung
Yesterday, in a weekly startup feedback call where I mentioned sometimes being overwhelmed with startup tasks, Lorenzo Carver suggested checking out the Y Combinator video by Adora Cheung on how to prioritise your time in building a startup. I decided to watch it in the morning and uncover the lessons which Adora has gleaned from being the founder of Homejoy and a partner at Y Combinator. Although the video by Adora is focused on startups (how one spends and prioritises their time in a startup versus personal life), the lessons are transferable and similarly applicable to personal living.
The key messages from Adora for startups is that:
- Time is scarce
- Time burns money and money is what keeps a start up alive
- It’s super important to use your time the best way possible to maximise your startup chance of success
- You need to prioritise the tasks of what’s most important to keep your startup alive
Unless you are going faster than the speed of light ( general theory of relativity), time is likely passing at the same pace for you as it is anyone else. Muhammad Ali once made an impromptu speech at a British TV show, that life is not really long and that “if the average person was 30 years old, then they are really just about 7 years old”. An excerpt of this speech:
“Life is not really long, let’s say the average person is 30 years old. If you’re 30 years old you’re not but about seven years old. Add up all the seven, eight, nine hours you slept for 30 years, out of 30 years add up all the nights when you went to bed and this morning don’t remember a thing… How long do you sit in school in America? We stay in school from the first grade to the 12th grade, six hours a day. Six hours a day for 12 years, break it down you sit in the classroom for three years without leaving. Okay, two years of travelling, eight years of sleeping, three years of school, how many movies have you went to, how many wrestling matches, how much entertainment, how many movie theatres, live plays, baseball games, probably two years of entertainment. So by the time you have children, by the time you’ve made way for your children, by the time you pay for your home, you’re pushing 60 years old. So life is real short. So you add up all your travelling, add up all your sleeping, add up all your school, add up all your entertainment, you’ve probably spent half your life doing nothing.”
- Muhammed Ali
A great way to also visualise how much time you have in your life is through visual blocks:
Time really is a finite resource. The finite nature of time means that a startup has to really prioritise it’s time as much as say the financial resources. This means that to maximise the startup’s chance of success, time should be spent on attempting to achieve the high value objectives.
Your ikigai is unique to you. In your personal life, you should be seeking to maximise what is impactful and important to you. Some people for example pursue the path of effective altruism through mental models as advocated by 80,000 hours. Others could be more stoic, utilitarian or even hedonistic. The latter is quite an interesting philosophy actually. Regardless of which mental model you subscribe to, your time is important and to spend it wisely you should uncover your ikigai and pursue maximising the objective function of what you feel is most valuable.
Being intentional in what you do brings great value for both your personal productivity and happiness.
Real vs Fake progress
Why would someone do anything that leads to fake startup progress? It seems trivial.
But according to Adora Cheung, it happens often. You should always ask yourself, “ is the task something you should do or shouldn’t do?”
For startups, real startup progress is best shown by what moves the needle. In the early days that is growth. The primary Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are what you would focus on growing. Initially for startups this tends to be revenue or active users. One should therefore ask, what are the tasks that can be leveraged for the purposes of achieving the most growth in these KPIs? Fake tasks are what doesn’t lead to growing your KPIs and optimising the wrong metrics such as going to conferences, trying to win awards, doing fake work etc. They are the wrong metrics to optimise for. Not necessarily helping you in helping your customers but vanity metrics.
In your personal life, there are habits, routines and rituals which you can also identify to discover what it is that you should focus on. When one works on building a startup, there are 100s of things you could to to improve your KPI. There are also perhaps many many tasks.
Lorenzo Carver who is building a startup on short, interactive audio lessons on Alexa is one of the most productive people that I have talked to. He has done a great deal of things from consulting, finance, running several businesses and he told me via email that, “ Time management may not be an appropriate term for what founder of brand new startups do. It’s more like running a food bank with 48 servings of food and deciding which 10,000 hungry tasks will get to eat that day “. It can be quite overwhelming doing so many tasks.
It’s also easy according to Adora, to let low level work creep into your schedule. Taking a page out of Ancient Japanse wisdom, you should do things that are of use. Journalling is one way to be able to discover how you perform. Through journalling each day in the past week, hour by hour, you can reflect later on what was the impact you thought what you did would do and what you actually achieved. Through this manner you might realise that a lot of what you do is done on autopilot, going for low level work that doesn’t necessarily have big impact. It fills the desire to check off things on the list — that dopamine hit of achievement ( which is fine in small doses) but not what you want to be optimising for when you might be overworked and time is scarce.
How to prioritise tasks
For startups, Y Combinator, the most well regarded startup accelerator in the world, recommends a constant focus on talking to users or building product. The former converts to customers, revenue, understanding whether you are on the right track and figuring out the product to build. The latter helps you get the solution to the users. Keeping track of these twin goals helps you understand the progress you are going through. Using the example of building startups, one could measure the tasks to be done via impact and complexity. This is as applicable in personal work as it is with when one is a solo founder or small startup team.
Below are some example tasks from Adora’s talk outlining a few tasks in say a generic SaaS startup:
One should grade and regrade the task items based on how impactful you think the tasks will be on achieving the KPI. They can then be ranked according to impact from high to low in an arbitrary fashion and then assigned a few probabilities on how complex that they can be done. In personal life, one could look at the head, heart and hand strategy.
Imagine you are a generic SaaS startup and these are some of the tasks you have drawn up:
One should consider the impact. Then also stack rank the complexity of the task. Easy, medium and hard. Easy is something you could do in less than a day. Medium is something that takes 1–2 days to do. Hard is something which takes more than 1 week to do. With the impact versus complexity, one can now stack rank and choose the best combos.
As shown in this second chart, one should really focus on the highest impact and lowest complexity. Pick enough tasks you can complete and do well rather than trying to do everything.
How do you know you are doing well?
For startups, one focuses on exponential growth. For personal life, you wouldn’t necessarily be as heavily focused on growth. However you would be looking to try maximise the time you spend on the ikigai areas you have. If visualised, your habits, routines, rituals and more importantly time is spent on what makes you satisfied and what you truly wish to spend a the most precious resource we each have, the time of life on earth on.
At YC, for startups, they reccommend keeping track of:
- Primary KPI (Actual vs Goal)
- Biggest obstacle to growth
- Tasks accomplished + impact
- Big learnings
An ongoing evaluation of your weekly updates will help you on how to prioritise and select tasks. Through keeping track of these tasks one could ask the questions of:
- Do you think you are learning fast enough?
- Are you predicting impact well enough?
- Are you letting low level impact tasks creep into your schedule?
- Are there consistent blockers to growth — is it the same one week on week?
- Are you completing tasks in a timely manner?
Reviewing your updates will help you get out of the loop of doing the same autopilot loops.
Are the tasks sometimes too complex? Perhaps it should be broken down a little. In this manner of startup focus, one could similarly apply it to personal life. So that even big challenges such as losing weight, achieving a significant currently out of reach goal can be chipped away and eventually you will either chip through or go see the top of the mountain 🙂
“Do the things with the highest impact”.
- Adora Cheung
Originally published at https://blog.happyness.design with thanks to Adora Cheung.
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