65. Task Management ✍️ make time for strategic thinking
Founders and CEOs can often get into the trap of working on mundane tasks while failing to take time to do the critical strategic thinking that will make the company soar. I found two frameworks that helped me in my startup that I want to share with you.
Being a founder is quite clearly an insane job. It's literally impossible. There are too many things for which you are responsible. Even if you work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, there's no possible way you could accomplish it all. And even if you delegate to your team, they don't have enough time to complete it all either.
So how in the world do you decide what to do? I struggled with this in my startup, and I found two frameworks that revolutionized how I thought about my work. They will help you optimize and prioritize your precious time.
One of the problems afflicting founder time management is that we are attracted to what we enjoy doing or our core competencies. So that tends to be where we focus our time. But what you're good at isn't necessarily what you should be doing right now.
what you're good at isn't necessarily what you should be doing right now.
The question you need to ask yourself came from Peter Drucker. What does the business demand of you? What things does the company need to have happen that only you can do?
Our time allocation can get skewed because many tasks shout for attention. The squeaky email, Slack chat, or text message will grab your attention.
Frequently we founders find ourselves in a very reactive mode. Fires pop up, people are shouting for attention, issues come across our computer screen, and we react to them one after another.
Unfortunately, the things that call for our attention are not necessarily what we should prioritize. They are rarely strategically important.
General Eisenhower popularizes an excellent framework for analyzing each of the tasks in front of you and deciding how to handle it. He broke down all jobs along two axes, creating a 2X2 grid.
The first is, "is it important?" Is it something that will move the needle for the business, or is this a task that should be done but will not make a substantial difference to the company?
The other axis is whether the task is urgent. Is it something that needs to be done immediately or before an impending deadline? Is someone shouting for an action or response?
Each thing you might need to do falls somewhere in one of these four quadrants.
The first case is straightforward. If something is both important and urgent, you should work on that right away. If your house is on fire, don't answer emails. Get some water, and put out the fire immediately. The fire is both urgent and important.
Similarly, the opposite corner containing tasks that are neither important nor urgent is also simple. It doesn't matter when or if these things get done. So, don't do those things.
If it's not totally unimportant, maybe you could delegate it. It's almost certainly not something you should do yourself.
The urgent but not important quadrant is a sneaky trap. It's the quicksand that captures so much of our time. Many of those emails and messages coming at you all the time feel urgent.
But if you stop and think about it, most of them aren't important. Many of these tasks can be ignored, delegated, or dealt with really quickly. They should not be the center of your attention. Unfortunately, they can quickly suck up 90% of your day.
The forgotten corner of the chart deserves much more attention. These are the important but not urgent tasks. They don't have a deadline but will significantly impact the company.
Strategy falls into this category along with many other meaty questions: What kind of a company are you building? How should it be structured? Who are your customers? How will you go to market?
You might have an advisor who periodically pings you and reminds you that you should be thinking about these things, but they are not in your face, so they tend to get neglected.
It's critical to make sure that you carve out time for those important but not urgent tasks. Carve out some time to think about what those tasks are so you can put them on your to-do lists and your calendar. Create a forcing function around addressing those things, so you're not just in a continuous reactive mode to whatever happens to be going on in the moment.
The other framework that I found helpful was to look at the level of abstraction at which you're working.
When you are coding, answering phone calls, making sales, or shipping product, you are working "in the business" They are things your business needs people to do if it is to continue operating.
However, it's also critical that you, as founder and CEO, take time to work "on the business." There are things you need to do at a higher level.
Some examples of higher-level "on the business" tasks are: Deciding who do you need to be hiring, considering how do you want to structure compensation, choosing the kind of culture you want to foster, whether you should pivot the company, and defining your go-to-market strategy.
These higher-level decisions and analyses will then percolate down to the tasks that you and others will be executing "in the business." We often get into situations where there's too much work, we're swamped, and all we're doing is executing, executing, executing. We then miss significant opportunities and fail to ask fundamental questions about what we're doing.
My rule of thumb is that you should be spending about 20% of your time, even as an early-stage founder, working on the business instead of in the business.
I would love to hear about the tools and techniques you have used successfully to stay focused on the right things in your startups. Please share them in the comments.
Links:
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The "what does the business require of you" concept comes from the seminal book "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker. https://amzn.to/3fyEdg6
