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 nonobvious 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 [Music] started to start like if we think of the white combinator motto it's Mak something people want and I think as a startup founder there's a million things you could be focusing on there's a million things you can do to help 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 and even once you figured that out which is amazing place to be there's 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 yeah fun things the fun things
and also the accessible things right 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 um the little business problems that keep
them up at night whereas it's much easier to like fiddle with um a new AI chatbot that you want to give to the sales reps because they you think it'll be fun and so 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 I think a lot of times Founders have worked at a company or gone through school and it's very clear what the road map is to get to the next step or what the task is and when you're a Founder
it's like anything yeah and 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 like 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 and I think one is like just being explicit about it writing down like 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 and 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 products fine we just need to get out there and sell it oftentimes that's the
thing and 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 um I always find that they impose some other person's way of thinking in onto my my brain and how I think about problems in a way that is distracting and painful and disorienting and uh maybe there's other people out
there like that as well and and to you I say like that's okay you can just use Apple notes right you can still use spreadsheets you don't need to use things that try to add a layer of abstraction onto that um to save you a little bit of time uh 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 and um I I definitely run into Founders who have built these huge architectures of notion documents and things that um
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 that there it's the equivalent of like cleaning your room because you don't want to do your homework so 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 and 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 and a lot of them are pretty extreme they're like wake up at 5: in the morning and go for a 10 m run and
then like drink only green smoothies and like do yoga every day you know it's like it there's a lot of people in the valley who are like 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 like they're not trying to maximize their life style in like crazy Extreme Ways to try to squeeze every ounce of like time and effort out of their body and mind
like for the like the typical successful founder that I know is just really focused on their startup and they just sort of like work on the startup all the time because they love working on it and so they work a lot but it doesn't really feel like work and they are typically
not like super deep in having really complicated systems for how to maximize stuff they're just like working on their thing right they're working on their thing and doing what comes to them organically right EX 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 point is a subset of what we had sometimes we sometimes call fake work at YC fake work is one of the most dangerous things to fall into as a
startup founder like 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 and sometimes it's really obvious when you're wasting time you 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 right there is one productivity concept that I think is
actually genuinely really valuable um and it is the concept of maker schedules versus manager schedules and this comes from a Paul Graham essay from many years ago the concept is like very simple but it's one of those things where once you understand it it actually like really
changes the way that you look at the world and the simple concept is that there's like two different systems of time management either you're on a maker schedule or you're on a manager schedule and like maker schedules are like programming or doing like deep
thoughtful work and if if you're on a maker schedule you really want to have lots of uninterrupted time where you're just making stuff and then there's the manager schedule where you're doing sales calls or you're doing lots of meetings with your direct reports and on
that kind of of a schedule you want to just have lots of meetings scheduled back to back and the most common like mistake that we see Founders that don't know this concept make is they try to mix the two and 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 tacnical founder and particularly if you're a tacnical Founder like your main job is to write code and code is very
difficult to write well in like 30 minute Snippets broken up throughout the day like it's way easier to write code if you have like a block of like several hours of time where you can really get deep into it same with doing any writing yeah and so like when I was a technical
founder um what I would do is I would take like uh the first chunk of my day like the morning I would basically be on a manager schedule and I'd have lots of meetings and then in the like late afternoon and evening I would schedule no meetings so I could just have like
six hours of uninterrupted coding time and that enabled me to continue writing code many many years into the company even when we had like 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 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 and believing in the kind of media personality of yourself right so if you are your company's pushing uh uh press releases and you're in Tech runch and you're being written up left and
right um you start believing that that image of of yourself and your company and not the one that is the true one which is like how are things actually going with the product and um it's very that's one of the distractions right so looking at your retweets and your
comments and all the stuff isn't really moving anything forward at all and I think that's the biggest danger with social media is that and actually think that the some of the best Founders so that don't spend very much time on social media they just don't have time
uh and 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 the one reason to do social media and to tell your own story and to go direct is if for your business or
product or service that's where your customers are and that's not everyone but it is enough like 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 you know being able to trend on GitHub
like you know getting enough Stars being on Hacker News like 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 and all of that comes from what do you believe who are your users how do you get in front of them or what are the things that uh they can tell you that nobody else 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 goto Market is just one version of a bigger problem not picking one single top metric or priority and focusing on that completely so the first one I thought about um
actually came from one of our early board members who had that habit of always asking us to stack wrong things so you know we always had like many projects going on and like it was always asking okay but what's your stack wrong can you order them by priority and I
kind of got in that habit and I helped that that helped me so much because anyone has is going to have like tens dozens hundreds of tasks how do you pick and you end up always working a little on it bit on each one and we see Founders doing that all the time like
anyone does that really and really stacking them kind of forces you to prioritize if you have like 10 projects for the quarter stack on them one 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 and kind of like force that's a forcing function to make this Choice otherwise you are not going to make the choice and the most like 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 ab c d because you're going to end up with a infinite list of things to do never stops a lot of stuff is really a distraction and one of the things we do during the batch is working with Founders under demo day goal and is
really a single number that's so hard with some Founders they always want to have like all this list of things to do and like targets and different goals picking one helps you focus like you need that focus on one thing and only one thing and the stack rank is kind of
like a version of that is like what is your one thing Steve Jobs famously said that focus is saying no so 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 most
important middle model for time management is not what you decide to do it's what you decide to not do like effectively there's an infinite supply of people or things that want to occupy your time right 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 amount of time and to not do that thing and that often involves disappointing people or people being upset that you're not responding to their emails fast enough or you know
you get invitations to really interesting things that you would love to do but unfortunately you're not able to and so I think it's being very judicious about all of the things you say no to is actually the best hack and this is something I've learned from the
most the most productive people I know it's very hard to get them to do things yeah that they don't want to do and 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 and I think the best Founders are also so they know what the priorities of the companies are they also have the self- awareness to know what are they good at and this is maybe as the company grows a bit but they're really good at being able to
figure out okay like 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 CU I I really enjoy it but they also have the self awareness
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 like 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 hyperfocus I think for Founders that are really good at this stuff they're like well my my
job is to talk to customers y 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 y I don't think I've ever heard the most productive Founders or at
least ones I think are the most productive Founders ever talk about like productivity in its own like they're not like oh what's the note taking app like oh yeah I got this really new to-do list app and it's great it's really increased my productivity like I don't I ass 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 the way to not have to work as hard H those folks don't 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 to action But first you got to click like And subscribe right now and hit the Bell
icon so you get every single one of these we the group Partners at YC want you to be successful and you can expect new videos absolutely all the time that try to help you build the startup of your dreams thanks for watching and I'll see you next [Music] time