Early-stage startups are hard. Your list of to-do’s grows longer every day, and you don’t have teams on hand to support you like you’d find in large companies. When resources are stretched, it’s easy to fall back on what you do have – your time. But that’s a mistake.
Your time is incredibly valuable. You need to treat it like a scarce resource, and only “spend” it on high-impact activities that take you closer to your goals.
Look back at last week’s calendar. Did you spend most of your time working on high-impact activities, or did valuable hours slip away on seemingly urgent, but ultimately unimportant, tasks?
If you have room for improvement, here are some strategies to help you use your time more effectively.
Apply a filter to your decisions
You can use a variation of the “high-impact activity” question as a decision-making filter.
Should you agree to an upcoming meeting? Well, is this a high-impact activity that will take your firm closer to its goals? If the meeting is with an important potential customer or investor, the answer may be yes. But if that isn’t the case, perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere.
Outline your day
Each morning, I take a few minutes to prepare a rough outline of the day ahead. I want to make sure I'm focusing on my most important tasks and projects, and not simply responding to whatever lands in my inbox.
But I'm careful not to take this planning too far. I know from experience how easy it is to fall into the “busy work” trap. Spending entire Monday morning organizing your Asana tasks may feel productive, but if your goal for the week is 10 new customers, it's probably not the best use of your time.
Set timeboxes
According to *Parkinson’s law*, work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. So keep this in mind when planning your day. If you set tight timeboxes for your work you’ll often manage to finish on time, but if you allow yourself too much “breathing room” you’ll inevitably end up using it.
Low resources ≠ no resources
Projects and tasks may be important, but that doesn’t mean they are a good use of your time. In those cases, don’t confuse low resources with no resources. If you can afford to “buy back” your time, hire a virtual assistant to take tasks off your plate or get outside help on areas of your business that are outside of your core skillset. You can then spend more time applying your expertise to work that creates lasting value and impact for your startup.
Use time to your advantage
Your team’s time is also valuable. If you’re trying to ship a key feature then your engineers should be writing code, not sitting through OKR planning sessions. Large companies need layers of structure, formal processes and endless meetings to operate, but startups don’t.
The lack of bureaucracy can be your advantage, allowing for speed and agility in execution that larger companies can only dream of. But only if you value your time, and treat it like gold.
