- Adora, a partner at YC, discusses how to prioritize time for startups
- Time is precious and should be used to maximize a startup's chance for success
- Real startup progress involves tasks that contribute to growth of the primary KPI (revenue or active users)
- Fake startup progress includes tasks that are not directly related to growing the primary KPI
- To prioritize tasks, founders should keep a spreadsheet of ideas that can move the primary KPI and grade them based on impact and complexity
- Tasks involving talking to users and building product are usually the most impactful
- Technical founders should prioritize talking to users over programming tasks
- The goal is to deliver value to customers and increase the primary KPI.

- The video discusses the importance of prioritizing tasks based on their impact and complexity.
- It suggests focusing on tasks that have high impact and are easy to complete.
- It advises against spending time on tasks with low impact and high complexity.
- Writing weekly updates and evaluating them can help improve task selection and prioritization.
- If tasks are not being completed, they may need to be broken down or the schedule may need to be adjusted.
- The video emphasizes the importance of moving quickly and making decisions thoughtfully.
- The primary objective of a startup is to move quickly and prove that the product is desired by customers.
- It is better to make a wrong choice and learn quickly than to spend time on low-value tasks.

YC Partner Adora Cheung shares her framework for how founders can efficiently make use of their time. She covers ways to identify and prioritize tasks, in addition to how you can measure their impact on your company.

Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6o-how-to-prioritize-your-time

This lecture is part of YC's Startup School, a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
1:41 Real vs. fake progress
4:10 Task prioritization
7:10 Grading impact
9:48 Grading complexity
11:20 How well am I prioritizing?
11:51 Weekly updates
13:30 Maker's/manager's schedule
14:57 Be decisive
15:55 Conclusion

I'm 1 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 startup's chance for success.

Which means you need to be really good at identifying and prioritizing tasks that are gonna be the most impactful for your startup's progress, which I've noticed after going through thousands of weekly updates from startup school founders that a lot of founders are not doing this well.

Let me first preface 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 on and so forth.

Everyone has different situations, so it's hard for me to, from up here, give you good generic advice on how to 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 to eventually work on and you update that very frequently.

So let's start from there, that you have a task list of things to do.

First I wanna make a real clear distinction between real and fake startup progress.

This is the easiest way to classify whether a task 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.

Why would anyone do anything that amounts to fake startup progress?

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 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 1 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.

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?

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 for a low-value work to unnoticeably creep into your schedule.

And it actually takes a lot of work and effort to not let this happen.

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 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 desires to check as many things off of a list as possible.

It feels really good to check things off.

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 2 things, right?

1, talking to users, and 2, building product.

Talking to users helps you with 3 things, right?

It converts them into customers and revenue, or helps you convert them into 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 product's 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 doing that as every idea you get.

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 culprit in making no progress during the week.

Then once a week, go through each item in your spreadsheet and grade the new and regrade the old items based on how impactful you think the task would be on achieving the weekly goal for your primary KPI.

There are 3 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 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 okay probability, you can hit your weekly goal.

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 patantic it is, is important to do.

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 5 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 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 convincing them to buy my product.

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 1 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 that it may have 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?

Because there are many tasks within each category of impact, for example, there's like 4 of here in medium and 3 in low.

And so 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 3 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 a day.

A medium task is something that takes 1 or 2 days for you to do.

And a hard task is 1 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 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, to go for the combos of high easy combos and high medium.

That is something, a task that has high impact and is easy to do, you should always do those first, and then go to high impact and medium, medium complexity.

And what you really don't wanna 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.

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.

Sadly, most of us have graphs that look like this.

These troughs of sorrow where it's decreasing and you're kind of like stable for a while at the bottom, that's when you start doubting yourself.

It's like, am I working really on the right thing or not?

So 1 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.

If not, what was the biggest block of the growth?

What did you do and what was the predicted impact and what was the actual impact?

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 1 you ever wrote for your startup to the current 1, to the last 1.

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 1, 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 2 suggestions for you.

1 is perhaps your task is actually too complex and you should break it down into medium and easy tasks.

The second 1 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 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 chunk of time devoted to each 1.

So many people will actually split their, divide their week into days, right?

So 1 full day they'll just spend coding, and then the next full day they'll spend meetings and talking to users and so forth, instead of having like 1 hour here, 1 hour there, 1 hour there.

For people who need to get more stuff done in the day, then they'll do half the day they'll spend coding and the half the day they'll spend talking to users.

So this is, for any Solo founders out there, this is incredibly important for you because you don't have the opportunity to divvy up the work across multiple people.

So it's really important to get your schedule correct.

All right, so I'll end with 1 final piece of advice, which is moving fast.

So in the beginning of 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.

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 1, 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.


Speaker 0: Hello, as Kevin said, my name is Adora. I'm 1 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 startup's chance for success. Which means you need to be really good at identifying and prioritizing tasks that are gonna be the most impactful for your startup's progress, which I've noticed after going through thousands of weekly updates from startup school founders that a lot of founders are not doing this well. So hopefully this will be helpful. Let me first preface 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 on and so forth. Everyone has different situations, so it's hard for me to, from up here, give you good generic advice on how to 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 to eventually work on and you update that very frequently. So let's start from there, that you have a task list of things to do. First I wanna make a real clear distinction between real and fake startup progress. This is the easiest way to classify whether a task 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 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 1 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? 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 for a low-value work to unnoticeably creep into your schedule. And 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 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 desires to check as many things off of a list as possible.

It feels really good to check things off. 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 2 things, right? 1, talking to users, and 2, building product.

Talking to users helps you with 3 things, right? It converts them into customers and revenue, or helps you convert them into 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 product's 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 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 culprit in making no progress during the week. So, now you're tracking this list.

Then once a week, go through each item in your spreadsheet and grade the new and regrade the old items based on how impactful you think the task would be on achieving the weekly goal for your primary KPI. There are 3 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 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 okay 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 patantic it is, is important to do. 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 5 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 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 convincing them to buy my product. 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 1 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 that it may have 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? Because there are many tasks within each category of impact, for example, there's like 4 of here in medium and 3 in low. And so 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 3 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 a day. A medium task is something that takes 1 or 2 days for you to do. And a hard task is 1 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 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, to go for the combos of high easy combos and high medium. That is something, a task that has high impact and is easy to do, you should always do those first, and then go to high impact and medium, medium complexity. And what you really don't wanna 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. 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. Sadly, most of us have graphs that look like this.

These troughs of sorrow where it's decreasing and you're kind of like stable for a while at the bottom, that's when you start doubting yourself. It's like, am I working really on the right thing or not? And so what can we do about this? Or how do we know? So 1 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? What did you do and what was the predicted impact and what was the actual impact?

And 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 1 you ever wrote for your startup to the current 1, to the last 1. 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 1, 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 2 suggestions for you. 1 is perhaps your task is actually too complex and you should break it down into medium and easy tasks. The second 1 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 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 chunk of time devoted to each 1.

So many people will actually split their, divide their week into days, right? So 1 full day they'll just spend coding, and then the next full day they'll spend meetings and talking to users and so forth, instead of having like 1 hour here, 1 hour there, 1 hour there. For people who need to get more stuff done in the day, then they'll do half the day they'll spend coding and the half the day they'll spend talking to users. So this is, for any Solo founders out there, this is incredibly important for you because you don't have the opportunity to divvy up the work across multiple people. So it's really important to get your schedule correct.

All right, so I'll end with 1 final piece of advice, which is moving fast. So in the beginning of 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 1, 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 product. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

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Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time