Startup founders, how do you manage your time?
We founded our new startup, LanguaTalk, 2 months ago. We did $23k in our 2nd month. Not a bad start.
On a personal level, I have a challenge: there are so many different things I could be doing. I'm constantly switching between tasks, and having to reassess my priorities.
Some of this is unavoidable. Running a startup, problems come at you thick and fast.
I'm someone who doesn't see the point in planning too much. I like to trust my instinct and decide what's most important each day.
But I've come to the realisation that I need more structure. I want to feel more in control and have a laser focus on the tasks that will move the business forward. And of course, decision-making is tiring. By planning each week, I'll have more energy and less decision fatigue.
So, I'm starting to use a detailed weekly plan (using Notion, shown below). It's OK for my days to deviate from the plan. But I'll always ask myself: is this task more urgent or important than what I'm doing right now?
I'm curious: how do you plan your time each day/week/month? How much detail do you go into? And what's your favourite planning tool?
This post is part of our newsletter, in which my co-founder and I share what we've learnt whilst growing online businesses, plus some more general reflections on life whilst growing a startup. Please do hit the subscribe button and give the post an upvote if you'd like to hear more from us.
I use a similar system but in Trello.
Each week, I have a column of things I need to do. Some are recurring tasks which are automatically created weekly and others are long-term projects. They might link out to larger cards on my long-term project boards.
I also found time tracking to be helpful. Once I’m spending a significant amount of time on a task (say 4-10 hours/week), I start looking to outsource it. I hired a social media manager who manages my newsletter and social accounts and am hiring a VA and Account Manager this month to help with customer questions and on boarding.
I wrote more about my process here if you want a deeper dive.
Thanks, Karl! Trello is a good option. The only downside of Notion is it doesn't have recurring tasks. Strange for such powerful software. Good call on the outsourcing. I've just started outsourcing a few bits too. The challenge is finding people who meet your standards.
I'm in a very similar situation as you are building Localazy.
For me, the most important things are:
I inspired my workflow by GTD considerably, but I'm not fully on it - and I would never consider it for family and personal matters.
Typically, at the start of each day, I go through emails, slack, and tasks and postpone/replan everything I don't want to do that day to clear my TODO list as much as possible. I always try to have less on my plate because some tasks will come from the team and customers. Usually, I'm not even able to do everything planned.
As CEO of a fast-running startup, there is so much to take care of, so I typically try to focus on a single topic on any given day. Today, I'm working on the product, and for tomorrow, I plan to wrap my head around sales improving our lead queue and sales emails for a specific audience. Another day, I have several calls with the team to check on the status and answer questions. I also have days dedicated to smaller tasks scattered across different areas. Focusing helps me to get into the flow and push the whole thing ahead.
During the day, I note all new ideas, notes, etc., and schedule them for the next day, so I'm sure I will go through them and prioritize. It's the best invention - I'm not going to forget about it, I know it, and I can focus with a calm mind. Before introducing this rule, I kept too many things in my head, being distracted, unfocused, and forgetting too many of them over time.
So, I'm basically pushing a ton of tasks in front of me, scheduled across upcoming days. I do some, and I add some. The good thing about it is that some of those tasks are not worth it, or they get solved another way. Not hopping on them immediately gives them the time to "mature", so I can look at them later from another perspective.
Some days, things break or an unanticipated situation arises, and you have to do something completely different. That's normal. Just replan the tasks the next day and get back to work :-).
With the team, we also have regular calls and meets, and we maintain a high-level roadmap, list of ideas and improvements, etc.
To include this into my work schedule, I dedicate some days to do table cleaning - to do small tasks (unimportant emails, paperwork, etc.) and to go through everything planned in PM (we use ClickUp). I reschedule tasks, clean them, remove obsolete ones, postpone unimportant ones, etc. It takes me around one day once per 2 weeks.
Basically, I plan quickly on a daily basis with regular long-term planning.
And one extremely important thing as a closing word... build a great team. I would never be where I'm without all these amazing people that help me. I fortunate enough to have the best team in my current company, so I can do my part of the work, and I know that they are moving the needle too!
Thanks Vaclav, appreciate the detailed post. Don't know how you found the time to write it given how busy your days are! It sounds like a lot of work. I wonder if you could simplify it at all. But I suppose with so much going on, that's probably not possible.
The system works well and so I can find a few spare minutes also to read and write :-). In fact, I read a lot of books.
It's not that complicated as it sounds from my long post. Simply put:
And that's it :-).