Episode 8: Episode 8: Prioritize your time

Akylles Talks

So let me go through an example. Let's say I'm a founder of a SaaS software, generic SaaS 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 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 insured to me by friends or whoever, and I know that if I show up at the office, I have a very good chance or some experience. I have a very good chance of convincing them to buy my product and so that's why that's at the top of the list. The next year is 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 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 of items at the bottom of this that 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 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 that it might have on helping you achieve your weekly goal, we also need to consider our second dimension of how complex the task is. That is how long would it take for you and your team to complete it. Because there are many tasks within each category of impact, for example, there's like, four of here in medium and three in low. And sort of the question is how do I stack rank those within that category. And so this dimension of complexity helps. So we can grade complexity in three ways, easy, medium, and hard. So 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 less than a day. 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 impacts and then also complexity and so now you can easily stack rank all the tasks in your list, and it's pretty easy to choose what you should prioritize. So giving the objectives to hit your weekly goal, the obvious choice is always to go something with the...to go for the combos of high easy combos and high medium. That is something, a task that has a high impact and is easy to do. You should always do those first and then go to high impact in medium complexity. And what you really don't wanna do is focus on these bottom things here, right? Something that has probably very low probability of helping you achieve your goal and it's 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 of the task with much conviction and it makes it really hard to show progress from week to week. So how do you know you are prioritizing? From the results Make sure to check my guides on building your startup on www. startupkudos.com IG @ramialame Be Organized, Be Passionate, Be Structured