I recently surveyed some early stage CEOs and the majority felt they’re only spending 25% of their time on their individual biggest priorities.
Founders, your best tools for success are prioritization, delegation and scheduling.
In the earliest stages, nothing is more important than customer development. If you’re the CEO, any work that moves a specific customer through the funnel should trump just about everything else.
Those tasks that aren’t about sales? Delegate as many of them as possible. This means describing Why The Task Is Important and What Success Look Like. Early on, it will probably feel like it takes as much time to communicate that info as it takes to do the work itself. With practice, you’ll whip those deets out in no time and empower your team to do great work.
The tasks still on your plate? Schedule focus time for them. Put 15 minutes to an hour on the calendar for each one. “Answering email” is not a task. Each email is a task.
You get two benefits out of calendaring this way: 1) you’ll actually carve out time to do the focused work you always seem to punt on and 2) you’ll realize you must (and can) say “no” to more tasks.
The eternal struggle of startups is they’re a hundred pounds of work stuffed into a ten-pound box. You’ll fail if you try to accomplish everything, because there aren’t enough hours in the day.
All you can do is focus on the biggest priorities, effectively delegate as much as possible and say no to the rest.
#startups #priorities #getshitdone