How to Focus on What Matters Most in Your Startup
Here’s your Startup Tip of the Day:
It’s easy to be excited when you’re in the trenches of a new startup. The fresh office paint, the new sign hanging outside of your office door, the stack of printed résumés seeking a slice of the dream and an option at equity, and the creation of that beautiful logo (Oh the logo! How we all love designing the majestic logo!)
Everywhere you turn, there’s something to do, and less hands than required to do it. By the time you get started, a million other things are auditioning for your attention.
Imagine being on a runner’s high, but being forced to sit still to write a 50 page business plan, review bugs with an engineer, reconcile a bank statement, draft a meeting minute synopsis for your Board of Directors, and pitch your dream to an endless batch of reporters, investors, employees and customers. Who has time for lunch?
Focus is the name of the game in your startup.
Where you focus, determines what moves and what doesn’t. Everything is important, but not everything all at once, only one thing at a time – but which what? That’s the secret.
I learned to ask myself a simple question every time I would start thinking about a new thing to do, or start acting on it – “Is this the most important thing I need to do today to move us ahead for tomorrow? If this doesn’t get done today, how will it impact us in the morning? If only one thing gets done today, is this the most important one thing?”
If the answer was “Well, this is a nice thing to get out of the way today, but it’s not vital to our survival”, then I would move it down my list of action items from Vital (Do Now), to Important (Do Tomorrow), to finally Do (Very Soon).
Things that are on the Do (Very Soon) list likely don’t matter, and will resurface someday when they become vitals. People who demonstrate a militaristic style of execution often yield the most consistent results. Founders who vacillate on what to do, when to do it, how to do it best, and who delay doing the vital things that must be done, fail fastest. I should know, I have been both types of people.
Something done now is better than something done perfectly tomorrow.
#mondaymotivation #entrepreneurship #business #focus #leadership #productivity #startups
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