Startup Experts Reveal Their Top Productivity Advice

A lot of people think that they're great at multitasking, and they are not. I think the best Founders, you'll see them be very picky with their time, and sometimes it's the non-obvious things that end up being the things that really unlock your business.

Today, we're talking about productivity. A startup ultimately lives or dies by this maximum. Everyone wants to be a part of a rocket ship, but nobody wants to join a thing that will fail without them. You've got to be that 10x multiplier, but how do you do that? The best Founders have figured out a way to get way more out of themselves.

Let's get started! If we think of the Y Combinator motto, it's make something people want. As a startup founder, there's a million things you could be focusing on. There are a million things you can do to help you focus on those things, but at the end of the day, it comes down to focusing on your customers first and figuring out what's the problem that they care about, what's the solution that's going to help them, and how do I stay laser-focused on that?

Even once you figured that out—which is an amazing place to be—there are a million ways to get distracted from that. It's very common for us to run into Founders looking for other things to focus on than their customers— the shiny objects, the fun things, and also the accessible things.

Let's say you're doing a B2B software company; it's really hard and tiring and draining, and just kind of drudgery to go and talk to VPs of sales or something like that and just really dig into the little business problems that keep them up at night. Whereas, it's much easier to fiddle with a new AI chatbot that you want to give to the sales reps because you think it'll be fun.

I think that's like a trap where you have to push yourself to actually prioritize and figure out what's most going to move the needle for your business, and then hold yourselves to that.

A lot of times Founders have worked at a company or gone through school, and it's very clear what the roadmap is to get to the next step or what the task is. When you’re a Founder, it’s like anything. Sometimes it's the non-obvious things that end up being the things that really unlock your business, and it becomes really tricky to figure out: is this actually a waste of time or is this going to be the next big unlock?

So what are some things that have worked for you or for Founders you've worked with to help you stay focused on that stuff? I think one is just being explicit about it—writing down what are my priorities.

So it's: what is my bottleneck? Here's my main KPI: it's revenue. Is it growing? Yes or no? Why is it not growing faster? Figuring out what activities you need to do to make it grow faster, which could be maybe our product sucks and we need to build more products. It could be our product's fine; we just need to get out there and sell it. Oftentimes, that's the thing.

Then once you come up with those priorities, the things that you need to be doing, then it's actually going and auditing your calendar and making sure that those are actually where you're spending the bulk of your time.

I personally always have a hard time with productivity tools as a genre of product. I always find that they impose some other person's way of thinking onto my brain and how I think about problems in a way that is distracting and painful and disorienting. Maybe there are other people out there like that as well, and to you I say: that's okay. You can just use Apple Notes. You can still use spreadsheets. You don't need to use things that try to add a layer of abstraction onto that to save you a little bit of time.

I think it's important for pre-product market fit Founders to be as open and available and accessible and not close to the metal but close to the customer as possible. I definitely run into Founders who have built these huge architectures of notion documents and things that define and explain how they do all these processes and stuff, and I just always worry when a Founder is doing that kind of stuff pre-product market fit.

It's the equivalent of cleaning your room because you don't want to do your homework. That's one big trick. When we say productivity, often what we’re actually saying is priority and asking those questions. Aaron Epstein pointed out: what's my goal? What's the number one thing? What am I trying to do? Are the things I'm doing actually aligned with that?

They are the stupid simple questions that get you 80% of the gain when it comes to not just productivity but working on the right thing at the right time. Left to your own devices, without that intentionality, you're liable to fall for something far worse: productivity porn.

Productivity porn is like articles about how to be more productive that when you're reading them, you feel productive because you are reading these great tips about how to be productive. A lot of them are pretty extreme; they're like wake up at 5 in the morning and go for a 10-mile run, and then drink only green smoothies and do yoga every day.

There are a lot of people in the valley who are pretty hardcore about this productivity stuff, and definitely some of them are successful Founders. But I think an important thing to realize is that most of the successful Founders that I know are not really into productivity porn. They're not trying to maximize their lifestyle in crazy extreme ways to try to squeeze every ounce of time and effort out of their body and mind.

The typical successful Founder that I know is just really focused on their startup, and they just sort of work on the startup all the time because they love working on it. So they work a lot, but it doesn't really feel like work, and they are typically not super deep in having really complicated systems for how to maximize stuff. They're just working on their thing, right?

They’re working on their thing and doing what comes to them organically. I think sometimes Founders want us to tell them what they should be prioritizing, but they already know. You know, they just want the validation of it. Yes. So productivity porn is a subset of what we sometimes call fake work at YC.

Fake work is one of the most dangerous things to fall into as a startup Founder. As a startup Founder, basically there's nobody who's really keeping track of your time, and so you can spend it however you want. Sometimes it's really obvious when you're wasting time. If you watch Netflix for 4 hours in a day, you know that you didn't get anything productive done during those 4 hours.

So that's actually not very dangerous. What's really dangerous is fake work because fake work, when you're doing it, it doesn't feel like fun; it doesn't feel like watching Netflix. It feels like you're working, but actually, you don't make any progress. Founders fall into this trap when they're not thinking about the particular goal they're trying to reach with the particular work that they're doing.

There is one productivity concept that I think is actually genuinely really valuable, and it is the concept of maker schedules versus manager schedules. This comes from a Paul Graham essay from many years ago. The concept is very simple, but it's one of those things where once you understand it, it actually really changes the way that you look at the world.

The simple concept is that there are two different systems of time management: either you're on a maker schedule or you're on a manager schedule. Maker schedules are for programming or doing deep, thoughtful work. If you're on a maker schedule, you really want to have lots of uninterrupted time where you're just making stuff.

Then there's the manager schedule, where you're doing sales calls or doing lots of meetings with your direct reports. On that kind of schedule, you want to just have lots of meetings scheduled back to back. The most common mistake that we see Founders that don't know this concept make is they try to mix the two.

They do some sort of combination, and then they end up really not being able to get a lot of actual maker work done because their schedule is too interspersed with meetings and commitments and things like that. I was a technical Founder, and particularly if you're a technical Founder, your main job is to write code, and code is very difficult to write well in 30-minute snippets broken up throughout the day.

It's way easier to write code if you have a block of several hours of time where you can really get deep into it. Same with doing any writing. When I was a technical Founder, what I would do is take the first chunk of my day, like the morning. I would basically be on a manager schedule and have lots of meetings.

Then in the late afternoon and evening, I would schedule no meetings so I could just have six hours of uninterrupted coding time. That enabled me to continue writing code many, many years into the company, even when we had a big engineering team and stuff, because I was able to carve out that time to be on a maker schedule.

That's a great point! I love that split of the morning and the afternoon. I love a maker schedule when you can swing it. It's important to be intentional, not just about your priorities but also how you chop up your schedule. One of the things that might eat up your schedule is something that distracts a lot of us: social media.

I think the danger with social media for a Founder is in believing in the kind of media personality of yourself. If your company is pushing press releases and you're in TechCrunch and you're being written up left and right, you start believing that image of yourself and your company, and not the one that is the true one, which is: how are things actually going with the product?

That's one of the distractions. Looking at your retweets and your comments and all the stuff isn't really moving anything forward at all. I think that's the biggest danger with social media. Actually, I think some of the best Founders don't spend very much time on social media. They just don't have time, and they don't find the validation being important. They find the validation from the customers being really important.

Embedded in that answer is also one reason to do social media: to tell your own story and to go direct, if for your business or product or service—that's where your customers are. And that's not everyone, but it is enough. There are enough things out there, especially if you're doing open source. You know, you should— it might not be on Twitter; it might be on getting enough stars on GitHub, being on Hacker News.

These are things that are very specific to what company it is. So you should always try to link whatever you're doing back to the primary goal, which is: I have a hypothesis. I'm trying to prove or disprove that hypothesis, and then if I get product market fit, this is great. All of that comes from: what do you believe? Who are your users? How do you get in front of them?

What are the things that they can tell you that nobody else in this market has tried to fix or solve for them? Getting lost in social media when it isn't the core focus of your go-to-market is just one version of a bigger problem: not picking one single top metric or priority and focusing on that completely.

The first one I thought about actually came from one of our early board members who had that habit of always asking us to stack rank things. We always had many projects going on, and he was always asking, "Okay, but what's your stack rank? Can you order them by priority?" I kind of got into that habit, and that helped me so much because anyone is going to have tens, dozens, or hundreds of tasks.

How do you pick? You end up always working a little bit on each one. We see Founders doing that all the time—anyone does that really. Stacking them kind of forces you to prioritize. If you have 10 projects for the quarter, stack rank them 1 to 10, and you know what? You probably will only do the top three.

Put the bar here: only do the top three because there is no way you can do the 10 anyway. Kind of like forces that's a forcing function to make this choice; otherwise, you're not going to make the choice, and the most easy, urgent, whatever is going to always be the thing you are going to work on. It kind of forces Founders to really start with why.

Why are you doing A, B, C, D? Because you're going to end up with an infinite list of things to do that never stops. A lot of stuff is really a distraction. One of the things we do during the batch is work with Founders under demo day goal, and it's really a single number.

That's so hard with some Founders. They always want to have all this list of things to do and targets and different goals. Picking one helps you focus. You need that focus on one thing, and only one thing, and the stack rank is kind of like a version of that: what is your one thing?

Steve Jobs famously said that focus is saying no. That's another way to get to the same place with a different technique: relentlessly saying no to all the things that are not your priority. To me, the most important middle model for time management is not what you decide to do—it's what you decide to not do.

Effectively, there's an infinite supply of people or things that want to occupy your time, and so you have to be pretty aggressive about what things are not a priority. The most important tactics I do is to make conscious decisions about what is not a priority at any single point in time and to not do that thing.

That often involves disappointing people or people being upset that you're not responding to their emails fast enough. You know, you get invitations to really interesting things that you would love to do, but unfortunately, you're not able to. I think it's being very judicious about all of the things you say no to is actually the best hack.

This is something I've learned from the most productive people I know: it's very hard to get them to do things that they don't want to do. Those people have no FOMO; they're just like, "No, I'm good." What really matters is not the tools that you use; it's that you are willing to make the hard decisions on what you spend time on.

I think the best Founders also know what the priorities of the companies are. They also have the self-awareness to know what they are good at. This maybe comes as the company grows a bit, but they're really good at being able to figure out: okay, I am the only one that can solve this specific problem, and it's what I'm good at; it's what I get energy out of. So I'm going to make sure I have as much time as I can to focus on product or sales, because I really enjoy it.

But they also have the self-awareness to know, actually, I'm not really good at this specific thing, so I need to find other people who are and work with them and empower them to solve the problem.

I think the best productivity tip is to not try to multitask. I think a lot of people think that they're great at multitasking, and they are not. A lot of the folks I've seen be most productive at their startup—the actual secret of their productivity is to hyper-focus.

I think for Founders that are really good at this stuff, they're like, "Well, my job is to talk to customers; my job is to build the product," and all this other stuff is probably, you know, unless it helps me directly in a very direct way solve those two things, it's probably not a priority.

I don't think I've ever heard the most productive Founders, or at least the ones I think are the most productive Founders, ever talk about productivity in its own right. They're not like, "Oh, what's the note-taking app?" or "Oh, yeah, I got this really new to-do list app and it's great; it's really increased my productivity."

I associate that stuff with people who aren't necessarily the most productive. At the end of the day, nothing can substitute for basically just putting in the hours and the kind of mind that's always looking for the shortcut or the way to not have to work as hard—those folks tend to struggle versus the ones who are just willing to put in the time.

So that's it for this week! We indulged you with some productivity tips, and now it's time to put these tips into action. But first, you've got to click like and subscribe right now and hit the bell icon, so you get every single one of these.

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