Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time

Hello, as Kevin said, my name is Adora. I'm one 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 going to be the most impactful for your startup's progress. 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. 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 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 going to assume you're doing what's best for you, whether it's 2, 6, or 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 to your startup in the best possible way.

All right, so when it comes to things to work on for 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: you have a task list of things to do. First, I want to make a 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. 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. Real startup progress is when you're really focused on things that really move the needle for your startup. 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 KPIs and goals. If you haven't watched it yet, please do. 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 going to refer to the primary KPI as the thing to focus on growing.

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 also 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.

Common things I see in weekly updates are things like attending conferences, focusing on winning awards, networking events, and optimizing the wrong metrics. While you may convince yourself these are good things to focus on, they are actually many steps away from delivering real value to your customer. 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 increase your KPI.

Now that we have one 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 low-value work to unnoticeably creep into your schedule. It takes a lot of work and effort to not let this happen.

So here's an experiment: try journaling in great detail each day in the past week—every single hour. Hour by hour, write down exactly what you were doing and be honest about 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. 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.

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 desire 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.

First, if you aren't already, you should keep a spreadsheet of ideas that can move your primary KPI. Not to be too repetitive, but these tasks are almost always a variant of two things: one, talking to users, and two, building product. Talking to users helps you with three things: it converts them into customers and revenue, helps you determine if you're on the right track or not, and helps you figure out your product's roadmap. Building product actually delivers a solution to the user to see if it translates into more customers and revenue.

As you come up with these ideas, you should log them into your spreadsheet and keep doing that for every idea you get. But the key is: don't do them right away. Just write them down. 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. Once we've gone through each item in your spreadsheet, grade the new and re-grade the old items based on how impactful you think the task would be on achieving the weekly goal for your primary KPI. There are three grades you can give to each task on your list: high, medium, and 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 will help you meet your goal for the week with high probability.

Medium means you're not sure, but with okay probability, you can hit your weekly goal. Low means 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 pedantic it is, is important to do.

Let me go through an example. Let's say I'm the founder of a SaaS software company. My goal for the next week—I just kind of launched—and my goal for the next week is just to get five new paying customers. 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 ten potential customers who were actually intro'd to me by friends or whoever. I know that if I show up to the office, I have a very good chance, just from my experience, 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 medium impact because they involve me filling up my pipeline, which is one step away from landing new customers but necessary to do. I also have video demos I can do, which for me aren't as effective as doing in person but are