Effective Prioritization Accelerates Early Stage Growth
Derrick, a founder (of ListedKit) in our portfolio, recently expressed frustration with so much inbound and the challenge of getting it all done. His words: “As an early stage CEO, there is a lot to do, always, but it is sometimes hard to be confident you are focusing on the right things.” It got me thinking about my own experience. I remember feeling like I was drowning in a sea of tasks with a small team, but eventually, I learned to swim. As a founder, especially when bootstrapped with little funding, you may feel like you're drowning in tasks with little time to spare. A good prioritization framework is critical to driving success. In this article, I'll provide a simple framework that allows you to focus on your areas of highest leverage.
As Archimedes said, “give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” Our primary job is identifying leverage points and executing aggressively on them. This framework will help.
Time is your most valuable currency, and the less capital you have, the more valuable it becomes. Spend it wisely.
1. Identify your primary and secondary goals
Effective prioritization starts with clarifying goals: define your primary and secondary goals.
Your primary goals are the most critical determinants of your startup's success. For many businesses, this will be customer conversations that lead to revenue growth.
If you're in the pre-product phase, your primary goals should be customer discovery, prospect building, and product. If you've already launched your product, your focus should be customer acquisition through sales and marketing, then product development (more on this here). Your secondary goals should be the objectives that support your primary goals and will often be related to operations, legal, etc. To ensure you're working on high-leverage tasks, prioritize activities that directly contribute to your primary goal and delegate or defer tasks that don't.
As a rule of thumb: your primary goals should take up 70% of your dedicated work time and your secondary goals 30%.
2. Build a Task and Idea List
Get it out of your head. Your brain’s primary job should not be storage but problem-solving and creativity. Use a tool to capture your tasks and all the random ideas you want to execute: from a marketing strategy you want to run, insurance information you need to provide, to a new product feature. Whatever it is, get it out of your head. Your list serves as a compass and guides you in effectively using your time. It will help you prioritize high-leverage tasks that contribute directly to your primary goal and let you defer or delegate those that don't. If you don’t do this, you will flail around, forget powerful insights, and subject yourself to the shiny object syndrome.
The idea and insights list is just as important as the task list. Many of your tasks will come from the insights you glean as you do the work and talk to your customers. The task list helps you be confident about executing the insights because you know where and when everything fits and gets done. The anxiety in your mind gets quieted down because you have a system.
3. Rank and Prioritize by Importance and Impact
Not every task is equally important or impactful. As you convert your objectives to tasks, categorize them into primary and secondary goals. Then rank them by importance and impact. It’s easy to default to urgent and important, such as a large customer suddenly needing your attention. Unfortunately, many things that will drive long-term success will be important but not always urgent. By measuring impact, you ensure you give them the priority they need versus just living in a world of urgency alone. If something pops up suddenly that’s urgent and important, it should take time away from your secondary goals first.
Think of your goals as buckets and tasks as rocks filling the bucket. You’ve heard of the big and small rocks metaphor. If you fill your bucket with random or small rocks, you leave no room for the big rocks. Prioritization helps you fill your bucket with the big rocks first.
For example, recording a product demo for customer onboarding may be tedious yet may fall under the primary goal of customer acquisition if your insight is that a lack of a product demo video is hampering customer conversion. Designing a new business card may be fun, but it should fall under your secondary goal tasks unless heading to a trade show in the short term and preparing for the trade show is a near-term primary goal.
Your most valuable resource is time. By focusing on high-leverage tasks that align with your primary goal, you’re shrinking time to success.
Assign an impact score to each task to emphasize how much it will contribute to reaching your goal. Important, high-impact, and urgent tasks should be at the top of your priority list, followed by important plus high-impact, less urgent. When there is much to do, find ways to delegate or postpone low-impact, secondary tasks.
Your task and idea manager is a living document that guides your days and weeks and lets you stay focused on the most impactful ones, knowing that you are not missing something important. Generally, 70% of your primary goal time post-product launch should be about customer acquisition.
Hold Yourself Accountable
This framework requires you to hold yourself accountable for how you spend your time. I’d recommend you create a journal of your tasks to see what you’re doing. Let’s Build Community members will get exclusive access to a template for task and accountability tracking. The journal will have your big goals, the time frame, your daily tasks, what you accomplished, and what you learned.
Do a review daily, but at least every week, to see how you spend your time and what you learned and accomplished. Be honest with yourself and ask – am I spending my time in the way I should be? Make your evaluation and adjust accordingly.
Make sure you’re also tracking the outcome of each task. Are the tasks you identified as high-leverage making an impact?
Play for the Long Run
This article is about how to spend dedicated work time rather than how to live every waking moment. A primary goal, above all else: avoiding burnout. You want to stay in the game. Optimize for survival over short-term gains. You need to prioritize not getting burnt out, especially in the early days when it can be so hard to pause. Carve out time to recoup, reset, and learn – you need it. Take a personal retreat.
Don’t spend your refueling time on work. Know the distinction and be intentional about it. Use this framework to avoid overwork and burnout, reduce stress and anxiety and have clarity.
If you want access to the prioritization framework template, join the Let’s Build Community.
If you need a deeper dive into points of leverage for your business, sign up for a coaching call with me.
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