Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time

hello as kevin said my name is adora i'm one of the partners at yc and i'm going to talk about how to prioritize time time as you know is precious especially when you're working on a startup time burns money and money is the very basic thing that keeps a startup alive not to be too philosophical about it but even if your personal burn is super low you can eat ramen days on end which i don't suggest and you don't have to pay yourself for a very long time there's always a high opportunity cost to doing your startup so it's super important to use your time the best way possible to maximize your startups chance for success which means you need to be really good at identifying and prioritizing tasks that are going to be the most impactful for your startup's progress which i've noticed after going through thousands of weekly updates from startup school founders um that a lot of founders are not doing this well so hopefully this will be helpful let me first pre-face all of this by defining what time i'm talking about so obviously there are 24 hours in a day and i'm not here to tell you how to allocate those hours across your startup versus everything else that is important to you sleep family friends hobbies and so and so forth um everyone has different situations so it's hard for me to from up here give you good generic advice um on how to uh allocate your time across these things i'm just gonna assume you're doing what's best for you whether it's 2 6 12 hours a day that you decide to work on your startup it doesn't matter to me for the purpose of this lecture i just want to help you figure out how to spend those 2 6 or 12 hours that you've decided to allocate your startup in the best possible way all right so when it comes to things to work on your startup my guess is that you already have something like a task list in which you put new ideas on um to eventually work on and you update that very frequently um so let's start from there that you have a task list of things to do first i want to make a real clear distinction between real and fake startup progress this is the easiest way to classify whether a tasks goes in the should do or the should not do bucket if it contributes to real startup progress you should consider doing it and if it doesn't then don't this seems trivial at first why would anyone do anything that amounts to fake startup progress but let me explain further so real startup progress is when you're really focused on things that really move the needle for your startup and in the beginning the best way to show this is through growth in particular growth of your primary kpi i gave a whole lecture on this a few weeks ago on kpi and goals if you haven't watched it yet please watch it i talk a lot about primary and secondary kpis there's always a balance between what to focus on but for the purpose of this lecture i'm just going to refer to the primary kpi as the thing to focus on growing so to summarize your primary kpi almost always is either revenue or active users and you should always be setting weekly goals for this to move the needle on the kpis the highest leverage thing you can be doing also always comes in the form of tasks that involve talking to users and building and iterating your product nothing else this is in direct contrast with fake startup progress which is when founders focus on things that are not directly related to growing your primary kpi so common things i see in weekly updates are things like attending conferences focusing on winning awards network events optimizing the wrong metrics while you may convince yourself these are good things to focus on they're actually many steps away from delivering real value to your customer and so if all the things you could be possibly doing spending any significant time on any of these things is almost always a bad idea the goal is not to optimize startup vanity but actually delivering value to your customer doing the things that will help you directly help you increase your kpi now that we have one way to filter what tasks you should be working on let's go a little bit deeper and figure out how to determine if you're prioritizing the right tasks this at first also seems trivial presumably you're doing what you believe is high value work i mean nobody ever says oh let me do the thing that is going to help my startup the least right uh but that's what i'm going to challenge there are hundreds of things you could be possibly working on to increase your primary kpi is what you're working on right now the best thing you can do to meet your weekly goal or have you tricked yourself into doing something else the reason i'm skeptical is because it's actually quite easy easy for a low value work to unnoticeably creep into your schedule it actually takes a lot of work and effort to not let this happen so here's an experiment try journaling in great detail of each day in the past week every single hour so hour by hour what is it that you were exactly doing and be honest on what you thought the impact was before you actually did it and what it was in increasing your primary kpi i think you'll be surprised by how much of it it was actually low value work and the reason is not because you're lazy or i hope not it's more because we tend to be as humans on autopilot so we don't give much thought to what we're doing with our time and our natural instinct is actually to go for low value work because it's usually the easiest and quickest thing to accomplish and it fulfills our desire to check as many things off of a list as possible it feels really good to check things off so but once you're aware of this preventing it is actually quite simple but it does take time thought and discipline so first if you aren't already you should keep a spreadsheet of ideas that can move your primary kpi and not to be too repetitive but these tasks are almost always a variant of two things right one talking to users and two building product talking to users helps you with three things right it converts them into customers and revenue or helps you convert them to customers and revenue it helps you understand if you're on the right track or not and it helps you figure out if your product sorry it helps you figure out your products roadmap and then building product actually delivers a solution to the user to see if it actually translates into more customers and revenue so as you come up with these ideas you should log them into your spreadsheet and keep keep doing that as every idea you get but the key is don't do them right away just write them down and this is important because always switching to the thing you just thought of which always sounds better now than later causes a ton of whiplash for founders and it's a primary call part in making no progress during the week so now you're tracking this list then once we go through each item in your spreadsheet and grade the new and re-grade the old items based on how impactful you think the task would be on achieving the weekly goal for your primary kpi there are three grades you can give to each task on your list high medium low these definitions are a little arbitrary in the sense that it's it's all gener it's all relative to whatever else is on your list but in general high means it's a task you believe that will help you meet your goal for the week with high probability medium is you're not sure but with ok probability you can hit your weekly goal and low is with very low probability you'll see that it's actually pretty easy to figure out what those low and high value tasks are when you compare them against everything else you could be doing which is why this exercise no matter how pedantic it is is important to do so let me go through an example let's say i'm the founder of a of a sas software generic sas software company my goal for the next week and i just kind of launched and my goal for the next week is just to get five new paying customers so here's just a sliver of uh things i can do to reach that goal at the top you'll see that the most impactful thing i can do is go to the offices of 10 potential customers who were actually intro to me by friends or whoever and i know that if i show up to the office i have a very good chance just from my experience i have a very good chance of of convincing them to buy my product um and so that's why that's at the top of the list the next few are of meeting impact because they involve me filling up my pipeline which is one step away from landing new customers but necessary to do i also have the second thing here i also have a video demos i can do which for me aren't as effective as doing in person but worth doing as well because they do lead to some new customers you'll notice that there are a couple items at the bottom of this which involve programming so a very common mistake technical founders make is to build things first and then go talk to users and according to this list to meet my weekly goal this means they would be choosing the least impactful thing to do for that week but with this method if they're honest about it they have no choice but to get off their butt and go talk to users instead so along with the impact um that it may have on your weekly on meeting helping you achieve your weekly goal we also need to consider a second dimension of how complex the task is that is how long would it take for you and your team to complete it uh because there are many tasks within each category of impact for example there's like four of here in medium and three and low and so the question is how do i stack rank those within that category um and so this dimension of complexity helps so we can create complexity in three ways easy medium and hard so easy an easy task is something that you can do in less than a day that means you can do a bunch of easy tasks in today a medium task is something that takes one or two days for you to do and a hard task is one that takes many days to do and you may not complete it within the week so once you go grade all of them you'll have again the second dimension here where you have impact and then also complexity and so now you can easily stack rank all the tasks in your list and pretty it's pretty easy to choose what you should prioritize so given the objective is to hit your weekly goal the obvious choice is always to go something with the uh to go for the combos of high easy combos on high medium that is something attached that has high impact and is easy to do you should always do those first and then go to high impact and medium median complexity uh and you what you really don't want to do is focus on these bottom things here right something that has probably very little probability in helping you achieve your goal and is very hard to do it takes a long time to do there's really no point in doing any of those things so just as important as selecting the right task to work on is making sure you don't try to do everything at once pick enough tasks that you can complete and do well doing too many things means you won't be able to complete much with much of the task with much conviction and makes it really hard to show progress from week to week how do i know i am prioritizing my time well ultimately you know you've done well if you're hitting your weekly goals consistently so it's you're doing well if your graphs look like that um sadly most of us have graphs that look like this these trousers where it's decreasing and you're kind of like stable for a while at the bottom um that's when you start doubting yourself is like am i working really on the right thing um or not and so what can we do about this or how do we know so one way is to do what you're already doing in startup school which is writing weekly updates and being really consistent and honest about it so the key components of weekly update is pretty straightforward what was your weekly goal did you succeed if not what was the biggest block of the growth uh what did you do and what was the predicted impact and what was the action and what was the actual impact and what it did what did you learn this week what were the big learnings this week and then by doing an ongoing evaluation of your weekly updates it will help you improve how you select and prioritize tasks once in a while you should review all your weekly updates like from beginning the first one you ever wrote for your startup to the current one to the last one and check for things like do you feel like you're learning fast enough are you predicting the impact of each task well did you let low value work or even worse fake progress creep into your schedule is your biggest blocker the same thing for every week a lot of people actually get in a rough spot where they're not learning anything new and just doing the same thing over and over without realizing it reviewing your updates will help you realize that and will force you to try to get yourself out of that bad loop in terms this last one in terms of completing tasks if you're finding yourself always running out of time to complete tasks you felt was totally possible to complete in the week i have two suggestions for you one is perhaps your task is actually too complex and you should break it down into medium and easy tasks uh the second one is maybe it is that your schedule needs to be rejiggered a little bit i recommend a modified version of what we call the makers manager schedule which was popular popularized by paul graham the essay is linked in the startup school library the basic idea is this there are high context switching costs to different types of tasks for example coding and meetings like talking to users meaning it's hard to restart and ramp back up on a task especially like coding and it's costly to exit at a time when things are finally flowing and you're getting stuff done so if you find yourself switching back and forth too much it may be that you're wasting time and need to rejigger things so you have a continuous continuous chunk of time devoted to each one so many people will actually split their divide their week in two days right so one full day they'll just spend coding and the next full day they'll spend meetings and talking to users and so forth instead of being having like one hour here one hour there one hour deer for people who need to get more stuff done in the day then they'll do half the day they'll spend coding and then half the day they'll spend talking to users uh so this is for any solo founders out there um this is incredibly important for you because um you don't have the opportunity to divvy up the work across multiple people um so it's really important to get your schedule correct all right so i'll end with one final piece of advice um which is moving fast so in the beginning your startup your primary objective is to move as quickly as possible to prove that you're building something people want the faster you figure this out the faster you can pivot into something or have the confidence that you have product market fit and can start scaling and building a tremendous business so making decisions thoughtfully and quickly is super important time is often wasted in indecisiveness the key is to be okay with making a wrong choice and learning fast so of course choosing the right thing to do at the get-go is the best thing possible but it's also the case that a person who chooses the wrong task to work on today but moves quickly learns why it's wrong and moves to the right one is better off than the person that takes forever to choose the right tasks to work on and is twiddling their thumbs working on low value stuff in the meantime that's all i have today on how to prioritize time to summarize what you should be doing always be working on things that directly impact your primary kpi do the things that have the highest impact to meeting your weekly goal and that usually always means what talking to users and building [Applause] [Music] products you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 91,041

Rating: 4.9417377 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, Startup School

Id: XcCmMOWuAF4

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019