Hi all —
Last week, I wrote the post “Move Faster.”
The post’s thesis: To move faster, you need to sequentially prioritize. (AKA: focus on your #1 most important thing at a time.) Get your #1 thing done as quickly as possible, then move to the next thing. Don’t approach productivity as “crush as many tasks as possible.”
I got a lot of replies. One question stood out: “This is super interesting, but how do I operationalize this when I have a million things to do?”
Why you don’t hyperfocus
Let’s invert. Three failure modes:
- You don’t know what the most important thing is
- You don’t boldly approach the most important thing
- You don’t block time to address the most important thing
If you don’t know what the most important thing is, nothing else really matters. You’re floating in a haze of unprioritized tasks – playing whack-a-mole with work and praying for some lucky outcome. This is wildly common. Startups are ambiguous, and most things are on fire. It’s difficult to identify what’s most important now, so most early-stage founders don’t bother and instead try to do everything.
Once you know what the most important thing is: Are you approaching it boldly? I’ve made this mistake frequently. I identify the #1 bottleneck I need to address in my business. Then I approach it cautiously, incrementally, conservatively, deferentially. I don’t think about what the 10x, elegant, simple, fast solution could be.
“Figure-it-out” type work is nonlinear, which breaks our linear brains: There are a million different approaches to any specific problem, challenge, or project. You can’t conceptualize all the possible approaches. These landscape of approaches can vary from taking zero time to taking years… that’s an exponential (nonlinear) difference. And the outcome of any particular approach can either kill your company or 100x you… also nonlinear. How you approach your most important thing matters: Are you picking the fast, elegant, bold version that could 10x your business and render everything else irrelevant?
And finally, most simply: Most founders’ calendars don’t reflect their priorities. If you know your most important thing, and have a sense of how to attack it, and you try to fit execution into the cracks of a schedule that’s bursting at the seams, you’ll still fail. I recommend blocking time in the morning every morning (1 – 2+ hours) as “time executing my most important thing.” Why morning? Because fire drills tend to derail founders’ afternoons.
If you find that you can’t get to your most important thing because other tasks & “business as usual” are getting in your way – that’s a signal that it’s time to give away some Legos, and outsource or delegate some stuff so you have focused time.
How to hyperfocus
You need some sort of an operating cadence that supports this. Once in a while – say every 1-2 weeks – you need time & space to explore two questions:
- What is actually most important right now?
- How do we approach it?
These are simple questions, but the path to the answers requires a bit of conversation & untangling the million questions in your mind. You may be able to do this solo, or you may need a thought partner. Sometimes co-founders can do this together, sometimes you need a 3rd party who is a bit more distant and can tell you the obvious things you’re missing.
Once you know what’s most important and how to approach it, then you need to communicate it and block time to execute. I recommend communicating in written briefs instead of slides (I write a 1-page brief for Reframe every week) – and blocking time is a matter of discipline.
Helpful?
