Stop Pretending You Don't Have Enough Time!

Welcome back to their episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will, Schroeder, will, of all the things founders tell us they wish they had more money, would probably be at the top of the list, but is a very, very close second. More time is one of those things that everybody seems to yearn for. I wanna open this a little story, a little fun.

You sort of test floated this episode. By making a little, a little Reddit post and you've raised some hackles on Reddit, which like, to be fair isn't, isn't hard to do. But even on Reddit, I feel like this, this was pretty extreme. Can you walk us through what your little stop wasting your time, you have more time than you think. Uh, post did on Reddit, I, the, the title of I Post, which to be fair was intentionally like incendiary.

My wife said the other day, she, because I, I pushed this post and the title was something to the effect, why I give my team as few hours as possible to get things done. Yes. Now. And my wife was like, you knew what you were signing up for, right? Yeah, you did. Like, you could have been surprised by the answer. So I posted it in the startup subreddit and basically what I explained this said the, the genesis of this episode. So I think, you know, folks are gonna appreciate what this response.

Here's what I actually said. I said I, I, I went through an experiment to find out what's the least amount of time we need to get something done, and then just started optimizing around getting things done faster with a compressed timeline. And in that post. The post was about compressing time and getting more time outta your day. But in that post, I made one line that said, engineering is notorious for this problem. Meaning, you know, things expanding.

Yeah. But I said, but they certainly don't have a monopoly on it. In that line alone is somehow what everybody just instantly jumped on and they were like, can't rally cry. You know nothing about software engineering. You can't compress timelines like that. You're gonna create technical data. I mean, when. Bat shit crazy on me. Tell me, tell me you don't know how to code without telling me you don't know how to write software, whatever. Chris cu right? That line was, yeah.

Yeah. And I was just like, what the hell are you talking about? Nothing to do with what I was talking about. So you're ranting about something that I didn't raise right. I made like you're, you're shouting off into the void at this point. I made the second mistake that you never do in Reddit, which is fight back. You fought back and I'm not like a fight back kind of guy. I don't have a dog. I don't really care.

The only way to survive on Reddit is if you make a mistake, you have to immediately possum, you just have to like roll over, belly up and just like. Try to breathe as shallowly as possible. It's the only way to come out alive. And so people started making just these lame comments, right? Which, which everybody does on Reddit, like, whatever. And I made the mistake of, of saying this comment has no value. Write something that's productive, right?

Because everyone, like, they believe that the coolest thing to do is make a snarky, really zero value comment. Yeah. And, and that was like, tell me you don't know software engineering, but without telling me you don't, you don't know software engineering. I wrote back that comment has no value. And people went nuts now. Nuts. Yeah. Well, because, because for a lot of redditors, your comment has no value. Equals you have no value. You have no value. Right, right.

But oh my God, I just, yeah, I, you didn't, didn't like a worthless human being. So to be fair, whenever we post on Reddit and I, I post occasionally just from different thoughts. Some, they either. Amazingly well, uh, I think I have like one of the top five posts on Reddit of all time, or like this one where I just got down voted. But it's all fire and ice on, on Reddit. There's nothing in between. So the point is this was a topic that was awfully contentious. Yeah. For an awful lot of people.

For entirely the wrong reasons. It was so misunderstood and what I was trying to say, what I did say, I wasn't trying to say this is what I did say. What I did say was this. Founders you have all the time in the world that you need, you're just not using it properly. And and that's true. And I pointed to myself as the prime candidate of that issue.

And to be useful, I actually talked about what I did to solve it, which is what we're gonna talk through today. And all people read was, that's not good enough for Reddit. Powell Yeah. In engineers are bad. Right? And so anyway, let's talk about that. Let's, let's talk about kind of what we're gonna try to, to discover here. The idea is we all have the same amount of hours in the day. We're all complaining that we don't have enough time, especially for like solo founders, et cetera.

Like I have so many things to do and I don't have the time, and my answer is always, are you sure? Yeah, of course. I'm sure, you know, things aren't getting done. I'm no, I'm not saying that. I, I get the, that they're not getting done. Are you sure that your time is fully. Optimized, and if so, how do you know?

I'll initially get a lot of pushback, but I'll say, look, this is how I know I went through. This is years ago, Ryan, you and I have talked about this before, years ago. I went through and I did a very comprehensive, but not hard to do synopsis. I just did a time log of my time in 15 minute increments for two weeks straight. I just kept an Excel doc at the time and just you'd write, wrote everything I did in 15 minutes. That part wasn't hard. It was when I went back and analyzed it.

I was like, wow, do I waste a lot of time? Yeah. Why was I doing that? Why was, was that, and this isn't me working nonstop, right? Like this is me at my peak of work, right? Yeah. So this isn't me being like lazy and I'm screwing around on social media time and anything social media, uh, existed yet I'm doing nothing but work. But when I unpacked exactly how much work I was getting done, it was hilariously small. Relative to the amount of hours I was putting in.

Yeah. And Ryan, I I think you've gone through this exercise too. We did. We did. We charted this at the same time. And, and I remember there were some other super interesting findings. I don't wanna dig into those today, but around, because this is more about like the true optimization within that time, um, as opposed to just like the elimination, but where we figured out things like there are different parts of the day where we're better at specific types of work.

Like there's golden hours of creativity and that there were different times of the day for, for the, the two of us. It's, it's such an amazing exercise and one that we, we put our teams through on, on a fairly regular basis, but yeah, the reality is, man, we don't need more hours. Right? We don't need a bigger bucket of time. We need to plug some of the leaks in that bucket, right? Because there is no more time, right? We all get the same 24 hours.

Figuring out where you're throwing it to the wind is, is the core exercise here. But let's stick with that for a second because I, I want to unpack what was happening to my time. You're seeing the leaky bucket, right? It was in places you wouldn't think about. Now this is back right before I had kids. Right, and so I had unlimited time as far as being, you know, unencumbered to family, so to speak. Right. Yep. That changed dramatically, and we'll talk about that.

Your time was fully, fully in your hands at your discretion on how to spend it. Right. This was my schedule, and I'm using this just so you can understand. The benchmark I was working against my schedule was I go to work. Every day while it's still dark outside, which is ironic because I still do that now just differently, while it's still dark outside. Uh, and I come home usually around midnight ish every day of the week. And on weekends, more or less the same, some version of the same.

And I was perfectly fine with that. I had no complaints about it. For what? Now that I'm looking back, that would've been 18 years straight. Okay. So if you think about the sheer number of allocated hours I had to work, it was all of them. So my, my point there is I looked at that going, I couldn't possibly have more output because I couldn't possibly have more input. That was the mistake I made.

I actually thought that working all of those hours was what was getting me those, those results and those outcomes. I was pretty happy with the outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. What I didn't understand, what I would come to learn was that was a massive. Amount of wasted effort. Yeah, it's, it's kinda like thinking about like driving somewhere in a V eight versus driving somewhere on a two stroke engine. Right. You can get to the same place on a lot less fuel if you optimize. Right?

So let's talk about what happens when I look at these time sheets, so to speak, and, and I unpack this, right?

What I found was that a lot of the things I was doing, the amount of time things took, everything from meetings to projects, you name it had a lot to do with how I allocated too much time to them. That was the first cardinal sin that I, I did not get. Do you remember when meetings always used to be an hour, like no matter what the topic was, because that's the size of the block on the calendar, Uhhuh, like, of course that's gonna be right.

It's too hard to drag it to hit just that 15 minute block. I haven't attended an hour long meeting in a decade, maybe longer. Uh, just to give you a sense, more like, I'm not sure I attend an hour worth of meetings. Uh, in a, in a week at this point. Not if I can help it. Right. Meetings are what happens when work isn't exactly. Meetings were number one biggest thing.

And back in the day, I mean, I'm saying back in the day for us, 'cause we've kind of moved past this, but back in the day, meetings were a big part of your day, right? Yeah. It was like, I'm in meetings, I, you know, business meetings, meetings, business, right? And so I looked at that. And then I started to think, this is so silly, looking back at this, I was like, how is it that everyone else seemed to agree that every problem required an hour Yeah. To solve?

And do you remember how well that is? The standard problem solving timeframe will right? Correct. That it's correct. Scientifically proven. And do you remember how it used to be bad etiquette? If, if the meeting ended earlier or if you left the meeting early, it was like, whoa, whoa on, we still have eight minutes to go. Right. Yeah. So meeting bloat was definitely way up there. Okay. The second big category for me was bullshit conversations. Now this one gets a lot of pushback.

Yeah. Bullshit conversations is what happens on Slack all day now. Okay. Like in other words, the water coolers just moved to Slack, but bullshit conversations are just, I'm talking about stuff and there's nothing wrong with talking about stuff. We're not robots, but it's not getting anything done. Like we're chatting, we're yucking up, but like we also aren't getting anything done. So no matter how long we do this, our work is just going to keep not getting done.

That doesn't mean stop doing it. It means understand the cost. You know what I mean? Man, I remember this one so clearly when we moved to that, the open office framework, when we, we tore down the glass offices. Yeah. And like we just had a big open floor. I didn't realize what happened at that point. I, I felt it after I felt it when we started doing more remote, and then when I went fully remote and, and here's what happened as an empath. Introvert who, extroverts when he has to.

I didn't even have to be pulled into bullshit conversations, will I just overhear them and all of a sudden they're internalized and they become my problems. I'm now spending time worrying about thinking about all these other people's problems. So the emotional drain that that had on me was insane. And it killed time. Right. I didn't have to be hearing that, but I was. And I can't ignore it because that's who I am. Yep. And so like I realized that.

After we moved to, well, when I moved fully remote, when when we moved from Columbus to Florida, I felt it. All of a sudden I was like, what is going on here? Where is this extra time and energy coming from? And I was like. It's all that time energy that was getting eaten up just through osmosis. Like I didn't even have to actually be in the conversation. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It's slack all day long. The problem with Slack is that you lose your hours by the second, right?

Yes. You lose your hours. Every one of those extra chats, every one of those extra threads, every whatever, just by a thousand cuts, you don't feel it. You don't even, that's what I'm saying. It's the boiled frog thing. Right. Let me give you a perfect example of where it used to happen. Now again, just move to, to slack. It used to happen in email the the dreaded email chain. Oh man.

So, uh, problem comes up again, I'm going back 15 years or whenever I did this, this thing, but, but I found it in my email chains, in my thread. So problem comes up, somebody posts to five people, you know, they're doing what they're supposed to do. They're not doing anything wrong, but they post to, you know, five people in the chain. Now you've just interrupted five different people. But that's a, that's a whole other thing right now within that chain.

People are going back and, and there's some sequence to it. Again, it just happens in a, in a slack jack now. But this wild thing happened. I went on a vacation. Um, it was actually during my, um, uh, my honeymoon and I didn't respond to emails, which was like a very unusual thing for me. So I just didn't have another way to like test this theory. And I remember coming back and catching up on my emails, which, like a, a rational person, that's what, that's what they do.

There's nothing worse than reading a now gone cold email thread. That's exactly it, man. That's it. It's one of Dante's circles of hell, for sure. Dude, I remember talking to to Sarah, my wife, and I was like, babe, there's like 14 things that happened just yesterday that I would've spent the entire day getting wrapped in that clearly I wasn't even needed for. Okay, this goes back to, you know, what is Slack now? Slack's even worse because the cost to engaging people is so low.

The frequency goes up dramatically. But if you could audit that, if you could audit that time spent in say, how many of those chats, engagements, whatever, required all of us and required my input, it's typically a very small amount. Yeah. Now we're pointing out all of these things. Not to say that they're bad. It's not where our time goes. Right.

If you were to rank every activity that you had during the day and say which ones had the most direct impact on getting shit done, I think you would be shocked and terrified at how few things you did. Not you just, you being all of us that you did you yesterday that actually drove the meter and how much absolute bullshit, uh, you did. Now imagine we've got an organization that doesn't try to stamp out any of this, right? Like no one's like, Hey, this meeting only needs to be four minutes.

Like, like, here's a good example, Ryan. In our leadership meetings now when we get together before the meeting in our leadership chat, you've got a Slack chat for, for leadership. I always say, Hey, we actually don't need to have the meeting this week. Back in the day, if you didn't have the leadership meeting, like what does it mean? Like, does this mean everything's falling apart? And I was like, 'cause we're all up to speed. Like, we just literally don't need this meeting.

We all know what we're doing. We all know what the other is doing, and we all know where we intersect and let's just go and do that. Let's get to the intersection rather than talk about getting to the intersection and we'll say, does anybody have something they need to cover? And of course they have the space too that, that they, they wanna do in the meeting. In almost every case, it's no think of, we just saved. Everybody's time. Everybody's time. That's in that, uh, meeting.

Right. And I don't think people have that sense of how costly time management is. It's a bit like saving money. Right. It compounds big time. Right. It compounds big time. The goal isn't to create more time, it's, it's to stop wasting it in in the same way. Yeah. Like when we stop wasting time. We started saving that time. We can compound that into so many other things and think about the fact, like we're talking about the founders right now, but it permeates the entire organization.

People suck at time management. The problem is they don't believe it. Believe they do. Well, it's, it's the first thing I'd say, like every founder, mismanages, well, before they're even given the opportunity to mismanage money or team or anything else, they mismanaged time. Right? It is and, and then it becomes pervasive in the organization because it just. How it goes. Right. I mean, I, you know, it's funny though. I was thinking about that.

One of the reasons for the hour long meetings in the beginning, I think for me was it was like, it was so lonely. Before there was any team that, once there was team, I just wanted excuses to hang out with people. Did a group hug. Yeah. And so meetings were the way to do that. It was just an excuse to, to just to have people around. Just like my little comfort blanket.

This interesting thing happens around the time that I'm, I'm doing this experiment. My daughter arrives next year. The miracle of birth that isn't interesting. A miracle of birthday. Yeah, it is interesting. And uh, so my father, for the first time, you and I had kids around the same time. One day I'm at work, this is right after summer, my daughter was born and my wife calls me and she's like, Hey, what time are you coming home? And I was like, what are you talking about? Right?

It is only six o'clock. She's like, yeah, we're gonna have dinner. And I was like, like, this is first dinner, right? Six o'clock is first dinner, is there, is there a new three or four hour daylight savings time? I didn't know about what talking about, and again, is, I say this with Jess now because it's, it's goofy. Back then, it wasn't like, it didn't even occur to me and, and I know when people like, I'm such a time machine, right?

When people hear about this stuff now, they're like, what a psychopath. Yeah. You gotta understand it wasn't that unusual. It wasn't. No, that's the thing, like we, it sounds unreasonable now. It wasn't necessarily unreasonable then, but you also have to remember that founders are not the most reasonable. People. Yeah. Correct. Right, right. It's all I had done so far. All I had compounded, that wasn't that far outta line.

It wasn't like if you had told me that, like if you'd said, Sarah just called and said, uh, when are you gonna be home for dinner? I'd be like, already like, what? Why? I remember every night I used to have Jimmy John's deliver my, my second dinner at 9:00 PM to the office. And I remember, uh, ironically his name was Will, who was our deliverer.

I mean, I, he was there every day, so I got to know him and we ended up hiring him in, in customer support and he ended up becoming the head of customer support. He's awesome. Anyway, my point is, uh, wife calls me up, what time you come home for dinner. And I thought it was like a trick question now it was like midnight, I guess. And she's like, no, we're gonna start having, uh, family dinner at six o'clock. And I'm like, damn.

Now first off, let's rewind back and say, will, how did it not occur to you that you were gonna have to come home to your family for dinner? It did not occur to me. Okay. And in that moment I was like, damn. I already scheduled a standup with her this week. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I was like, I'm about to lose six hours of my day. Right. Yeah. But this was so important. This was such a, a critical moment that just, you know, forced what we call in our family a happy accident.

Like, you know, when, when something happens and we're like, oh, you know, worked out great. It was a happy accident. Here's what happened. The next day, I, I came into work. I was like, shit, I've gotta get everything I need to get done by six o'clock. That's impossible. And it turns out it is not. The miracle of birth was followed by another miracle.

The miracle of time compression. The miracle of time compression, the power of constraints. We always talk about how long things take to get done, and my answer is always by what measure. Right. And so a lot of people will say, well, I think it'll take five hours to get this done. I was like, if you had 50 hours, could you get it done? Like yeah, of course. Obviously I can get it done in five. If you had two, could you get it done? Ah, I couldn't possibly get it done in two.

Have you tried And that's, that's where this started to come in. I started to become obsessed with the idea of time compression. Yep. How quickly can I get something done? Now the cynics here are instantly gonna say, we're just gonna burn yourself out 'cause you're gonna be trying to get everything done so quickly. That's, that's where you were. Wrong. Cynic person, Allah, Reddit. Um, I wanna get something done faster and more efficiently so I have more time, so I have more time.

And so I started to apply these constraints on everything that I was doing. I always say, I've gotta write a newsletter article. I normally give myself all day to do it. I need give myself two hours. And this magical thing happens when you start to apply constraints. It just takes two hours to get something done. Yeah. When the clock shrinks, focus sharpens, like, we see this in a lot of other places, like think about how much happens in like the last 30 seconds of a close basketball game.

All the timeouts, all the play calling, all this stuff, because we have to create, we have to create something in a really, we had all that other time. Yep. And we played the up until now, but it's gonna be decided based on this intense and tiny amount of, of time that we have left. What happens? An intense amount of focus comes. Yep. Because that's all we have left and we know that's all we have left when we don't have that constraint.

If basketball games just kept going until one of the teams gave up, they'd be a hell of a lot longer, but we'd still just have one winner and one loser. Yeah, yeah, right. No outcome change. Yep. But a lot more time spent. And so I started to realize in all the things that we are doing, you know, my own work and the company's work, whatever, the more time we gave ourselves, the more of a disadvantage we created.

I had come to believe that I had the entire day, I had 6:00 AM to midnight every day to get work done. So not surprisingly, all my work took exactly that. But all of a sudden I cut that down into I had to be done by 6:00 PM Yeah.

And all of a sudden it forced me to say no to a bunch of stuff. Yes. Which having extra time didn't do it forced me to say, no, I can't spend longer in that meeting. No, I, I can't get involved in this. Whatever this thread is, I, whatever. And again, nowadays, like a lot of the time gets eaten up on social media and there's so many distractions now. Yeah, yeah. In order to, you know, to rupture your focus.

And I started to realize that that my focus, my ability to maintain that focus was my job. And when I made the priority right, it changed everything. Everything.

You know something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all dayLong@groups.startups.com. So if. Any of this sounds familiar. Stop guessing about what to do.

Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.

That prioritization is so important, man. I, and that's, I think for me, you know, deadlines aren't scary. They're They're liberating. Yeah. Because it forces you to prioritize what actually. Matters. And I think the more diligent you become about this, the better you get at it, the more clarity you get around, like what actually does move the needle here?

To your point earlier around, like if you really do look at your time and like add up the time spent on Slack answering questions that probably didn't really need to be answered.

We talked about this once before as part of this exercise. In fact, um, we may have talked about on the pod or not, I don't remember, but I remember just not answering emails. Yeah, I just stopped answering certain emails and you know what happened? If it was really important and my input was really needed, they'd email again, and then I would answer.

Now, some people might go like, well, that's, that's really rude, or That's a waste of the other person's time to make them ask twice you wanna know. The funny part about that is about 10% of the time, they ask twice every time. Right? Meaning, I would've wasted all that other time. And like, look, if you're the founder or you're the manager, you're whoever, like your time is by nature. More valuable because you have to spread and create impact across the entire organization. You bet.

And so if you're spending your time answering what turned out to be 90%, just waste, not a great trade off. So I was always willing to say like, look, yeah, that might be a pain for that person to have to ask me twice, but that's better than me answering. 90 out of a hundred emails that didn't need my response. I think there's another point here too.

What I got really good at, really, really good at was taking big things and making them, uh, tiny bits. So kind of, you know, the, the, the concept of, of how do you move a mountain, one pebble at a time. I became a ninja at taking really big things that I needed to get done. Like, for example, if I needed to write a book, I'm like, I can write any book. You name it. Write one paragraph at a time. And when, when I say that people like, oh, that's trite. You still have to write the whole book.

No, you don't. All you have to do is write one paragraph today. That's it. Your entire job is one paragraph. That's all you have to do. You keep doing that on a, a daily basis, and that's, you know what we've done so well at this company and that shit adds up.

It does. That's that compounding effect I was talking about, right? Yeah, man. You just keep doing, you keep consistently being milant about your time, the amount that is saved and the amount of stuff that gets done. Really, really stacks up.

And so, you know, Ryan, you, you and I have talked about where, you know, I'm in the process of building a house right now. Yes, ma'am. And I built every cabinet, every closet, every vanity, a lot of the furniture. Staircases like everything inside this house in my free time. And it's not a small house. Right? And I say that to say people like, where do you find the time? I'm like, I've always had the time. The, the problem wasn't finding it.

The, the problem was it was taking away my, um, my distractions. But here's how I do it. At four in the morning, I wouldn't recommend this to anybody, but at four in the morning I go into my workshop and every single day for just a few hours a day, I get one thing done right. It, it could be the equivalent of like, it complete. Dude, but it compounds. Yeah. You know, let's say I'm building a kitchen cabin. I'm just using that as an example of output.

I don't say I have to build the whole kitchen. Nope. I say on Tuesday morning, I have to get up, I have to go into my workshop and I have to just build what we call the carcass, just like the, uh, the outer part. Yep. To the thing. That's all I have to do. That's it. And I have to be laser focused on just that piece. Like it has to be, it gets done. Everything has to be done. I don't think about.

The fact that I'd have to do a hundred more, or how about like when you came over and we were building, uh, drawers together, right? 72 drawers later. 72 drawers, right? Like 72 drawers. And these are massive drawers. Somebody's like four feet wide. 72 drawers is a bananas. Number of drawers to build. But what I did is I'd go in each day. I say, okay, all I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna put what, what we call a, a DTO in, in one of the, the, the drawer side. That's it. That's all I'm gonna do.

I'm just gonna do like a hundred of 'em today, right? In my few hours. And tomorrow I'm gonna do another. Tomorrow I another, and I use this just so people can visualize like this unit of work. And guess what, you stack that every day consistently. Dude, there's an entire house build out. Yeah, like exactly like that. Not because I took two years off to build a house. 'cause I dedicated a few hours every day with insane focus on a micro task. And it added up. Yeah. Now that's, that's house.

But we applied the same exact methodology to startups.com. Yeah, that's it. When you put constraints on, it doesn't limit the output. It cuts the crap that was limiting the output because it was never output in the first place. There's so much stuff that just gets in the way, and that's the beauty of that level of focus and just saying, I'm just gonna do this one thing, because it doesn't leave room for those other distractions.

It doesn't leave room for those other time stealing things that weren't going to get to output in the first place. They were never part of output. Right, right. Regardless of man, some of them have their space and they are important, right? Yes, we do still need to talk to our teams. We do need slack. We do have to be mindful about the fact that there, it does eat time and it does take away from productivity. It doesn't.

Yeah. And this isn't say that I, I, you know, never respond to Slack, never have meetings, never. Like that's ridiculous. It's, look at what those are and ask yourself, where's the core bit of value and optimizing for that. Then take that discipline, take that, take your own discipline. Expanded across the organization. 'cause here's where it gets real interesting. If I could be, let's say two, three times more productive, what happens if I can get a hundred other people?

To be two, three times more productive or said differently, four other people. So I don't need 12 people. You're compounding the compounding at that point. Yeah. This is where we get some exponential differences in, in output. Here's how we institutionalize this. Uh, and Ryan, you and I have been living through this for a very long time, and we can speak volumes to the efficacy.

What we did is we took all of our timelines as a company. And we moved all of them from months and months and months like we do planning of course, like ahead of time. So, you know, kind of know what project path is. Yeah. You gotta know where you're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we don't give anything more than a week. So everything has to be done by Friday. Now, people are, this is what people in Reddit, free tech, you can't get everything done by Friday. All software can't be built by Friday.

Do you not ship features that can't get done by Friday? No moron. Sorry, I'm a little fired up about, uh, by Reddit. Um, that doesn't make any sense. Like, why do you even say that? I hear Reddit coming for you right now. Will, I can hear the clack of a, they're the way of a thousand neck beards upon you, and so, uh, no, but what it is, is no, you basically what you do is you say, what part of it can we get done by Friday? Yes. Break it down and focus on that.

It's put the data, the side of the drawer face, that's all you. Exactly. Exactly. That's it. It's an eight week project. What can you get done on this project? What segment can you get done by Friday? Yeah, Reddit saw you hitting people with sticks until they ship the entire product in a week. That's what they were like, you're for, you're overworking. You're micromanaging. You're doing all that. No, no. We're just saying like, just figure out what you can get done by Friday.

Yeah, and what's interesting is once you start doing that, you start thinking about what can I get done by Friday? It turns out you actually get a lot more done by Friday when you pick Friday as the target, when you break things down into smaller pieces because here's the fun thing. You can always do more. Right? Right. If it turns out like if you pick too small of a target, you can add onto that. Yeah. Right. But you can't do the inverse. I'll use meetings as the example, right?

Yeah. So if you set it for an hour meeting and you go spend the hour. There's nothing you can do about that. You set a meeting for 15 minutes, it turns out it needs 30. You can add 15 more minutes to the meeting and get to 30 and get the outcome that you needed. But if it turns out you could have done it in 15, what the hell did you just do with the other 45 minutes? You wasted it. That's exactly, it. Wasted it for everybody that was sitting in that room.

I had the same thing I do the my office hours, which I'm gonna start here in an hour, and I do back-to-back office hours with our founders every week, and they're only 15 minute increments, uh, for my office hours. Everyone initially is like, well, what am I gonna possibly get done in 15 minutes? I was like, A lot. If you get to the point and when people get on the, the call, they're prepared, they move quickly. They like, uh, we don't talk about the weather.

We just get straight into right into it. Exactly what they need help with. Right. We've got 15 minutes. Go. The timeline forces focus. It does and, and so let's keep building on that again. Our Reddit mob was like, well, you're just trying to like, you know, grind everybody down. Like no, you're missing the points. It's actually the polar opposite. Number one, our team sets their own deadlines, so it would only be a problem if I was telling them they have to do something by Friday. Right.

That takes three weeks, which is how everybody, right, you have to ship three works weeks of stuff in one week. That's what's not all we're saying, right? No. Instead we're saying it's a three week project. I get it. What part, what third can you get done by Friday? Now, here's the other thing that that was really unexpected that came out of this. When something takes three weeks to do. Or, you know, you have, you have a three week timeline.

It's like this weight that's over your shoulders the entire time. Yeah. It's like when you have a term paper due and you know, at the, the beginning of the, the semester that it's gonna be due at the end of the semester and there's this weird weight that just sits with you the entire time. And are you saying that people might procrastinate in that same period? Never. Never. Right? No. But, but here's the more important part though. At the end of the week, you can just go home.

You got your work done. Instead of saying, well, it's not really done 'cause I still have two more weeks worth of work. Well, guess what? On Friday or whatever your timeline is, you can stop worrying about that because you actually accomplished what you're supposed to accomplish and you can go be free. This was one of my number one pet peeves personally, is that I could, no matter what I did at work, I could never feel like I like, like I was done. I always, well, yeah.

When you pick things, if you pick something with a two month timeframe at the end of every day until that whole thing is done, there is a sense of incompletion. There is, and, and it drives. Correct. It's a huge issue, by the way. Yeah. It's, it's also, it's, it's horribly demoralizing. Demoralizing. I was just gonna say exactly that and, and I found it as much in myself. One of the problems I have is like a lot of the things that I do have very long timelines, right?

So if we're gonna like, release a new feature, like the, the amount of planning that goes around that the, you know, the round of development takes months and months and months and months and months. So I can never leave today and say, oh, I got everything done. Yeah. So the first thing I do, and I'm very, uh, militant about this, the first thing I do with my day is I say, what is the absolute least I need to get done today? And by least that doesn't mean that I'm undershooting the mark.

I'm saying no matter what this has to get done. Yes. Ideally I'll get done more. To be honest. I usually don't get more done, but I think that's part of the interesting part of, of the exercise. You start getting pretty good at estimating what you can actually accomplish, I think. But I think, but the bigger thing is I'm doing a better job of accounting for the fact that there's, it's not like nothing else will happen in my day.

So, you know, let's say that, that I need to write a newsletter, right. You know, for, for, for what we do with this podcast and stuff like that. I know that it'll take a couple hours and if I had nothing else to do in the day, like truly, like I, I was on an island somewhere and no one else could talk to me. Maybe that's how long it would take, but that's totally unrealistic. I'm a CEO of a company. Right? Right. Like all kinds of stuff comes up all day long. Yep. It's start, stop, start, stop.

And each time you lose, you lose steam, you lose momentum a hundred percent. And so I know it's going to take longer, so I can't stack three more of those up because the amount of, uh, distractions I'm gonna have are meaningful. Okay. But now. If I don't account for that, and I say, well, hey, a newsletter only takes two hours, so I'll do two hours for that and two hours for this next thing, an hour for the next thing, an hour for the next thing.

Where I lose is I will never actually get all that stuff done right because, or more specifically, I'll get distracted in so many places that no one thing will get done. I'd rather be in a position where all I'm doing is putting DAOs in the sides of, of drawers for like, you know, for hours straight. And yes, maybe I'd like to go build the drawers too, but so long as I get this one thing done, I can then move on to the next.

So I just say laser focused on one thing at a time, and as a result, I get a lot of shit done. You do, and like let's circle back to that point around like the longer timeframes and where that becomes all of that, that demoralizing weight that sits over you. Yeah, because part of what's happening on a daily basis, this is why like when you have those longer timeframes, you have more you have to accomplish before you feel like you've accomplished anything.

When you don't break it down into its constituent parts and, and deal with 'em in that way. Is that you do know that those distractions are gonna come into play, right? And that's why there's that constant pressure. Well, if I just get a little bit more done today, right? Yeah. If I just get, if I had just gotten a little more done then, then maybe if that happens, or if this happens, and our ability to predict these things on a daily basis gets a bit better.

But when the minute you expand that to like even a week can be difficult sometimes. Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, a month out, six months out. Forget it, man. You ask the team what they can get done in six months, you're gonna get some bloated plan that is maybe 15 to 20% accurate. Right? Right. Ask what you can get done by Friday. You get accuracy and magic. It actually happens. Okay. Let's stick with that. It actually happens.

Yeah. You see, if we were to say, what can you get done by next Friday? Number one, a million things can happen between now and next Friday. Yep. So you, you, the moment you, is it even valid? We even still need to do it, right? Yeah. You name it, right? A million things change. Okay. The second thing is, if I'm not accountable for until next Friday, I don't need to act with, with any sense of purpose or urgency. And people give urgency a bad rap.

They think urgency means I'm being sloppy and stressed and things like that. Urgency just means there's a priority to it. There's just a priority to you, you're clear on the priority. That's all it means to me. Right, right. This is the urgent one. Correct. Right. And that just means I might have nine other things to do, but this is the priority I need to get this done more so than everything. Yep. We've been working off this system for well over a decade. It is so easy to manage to.

Yeah. And again, I think the greatest thing is the reason that, you know, we can have these, uh, leadership meetings and people will say, Hey, I actually already know what I need to do is, because it ain't frigging hard to know what you need to do in four and a half days. Right? Yeah. Like it's so incrementally easy to manage, and again, I know everybody takes this to software. I'm actually least concerned about software when I talk about this, right?

Ryan, you can appreciate this as, as, as a CMO. Marketing is incredibly hard to manage around timelines. What are you gonna get done? Like, you know, uh, what are you gonna achieve, et cetera. Making smaller parts is incredibly important. Sales is another great example. Yeah. How many outbound calls, uh, you know, what kinda response rates did you get, et cetera. Like, there's so many things that if you manage 'em in a, in a smaller chunk, they're easier to talk about.

When you expand them out, when you expand out these initiatives for like a month into them, even looking month time, them becomes very difficult, right? They're too morphous. Yep. And again, like it's, it both compresses time in a way. It creates focus. Yeah. And it's, but it's also very free, right? So that the compression doesn't come with pain. It's, it's the opposite. It creates freedom for all that other stuff too, right?

So, yeah, let's talk about what, what do we do with all this, this, this newfound time. That's the part everybody on Reddit missed. I was like, dude, everybody thought I was being like the ultimate slave driver. Uh, all they did is read the headline. I get it. Social media, but, but I was like, no. Here's what's magical about this. We freed up so much time to go do other stuff. And again, everybody misread it to mean like, compressing your time so I can make you do five more things.

I was like, no, those five more things are go home, go to the gym. Fuck you want. I don't care. Right? Like the point is you already got your work done here. You can feel finished and you couldn't leave. Like, who's opposed to that? Blows my mind. Got Abe on the headline. You buried the lead on that one. Will. I did. It was my fault.

But, but the, the point is, if we can say, look, if we stay, if we keep our timelines compressed, if we stay focused and we just knock out the stuff that you know needs to get done for this week, then all of us can say, you should be leaving your desk, so to speak, metaphorically right now because you're done. How good does that feel in a business that is not well known for saying you're done for the day? Like, like we don't clock outta this business ever.

How good does it feel to be able to walk out the door and be like, you know what, for today I am good. I'll more, I got what I need do today. Done Right. Go enjoy that soccer game or go enjoy yoga or go, it doesn't matter. Whatever man. Yeah. More time doesn't have to mean more work. It can correct and sometimes it does. You can pack more, but sometimes the ROI is a nap. Right? Yeah. Or it's time to actually like make a healthy lunch and eat it.

I can't help but look at reclaimed time as founder equity and that you get to reinvest where it matters the most, wherever that might be. Right? That might be personally, that might be professional, that might be with the team, might be where, wherever. But I think that, you know, the point isn't to fill every hour, it's to make every hour that you do use count. Yeah. And I think that's where it most often goes wrong for founders. Yeah, I agree.

And I think for like for me, because I know every day I have this system in place, I never have to feel like any day I have to like boil the ocean on any given day. I'm like, you know what, today is just put das in in drawer sides, right. That's it. That's all I gotta do today. And if I do that, look for everybody listening, I have to, I have to do this will, because nobody knows what a dayto is.

Will's making tiny little slots in the side of a board that he's gonna stick in something called a biscuit, which is just a flat piece of wood that fits exactly the same size. As the slot he made so he can connect it to another piece of wood with glue and it'll be that much more, uh, structurally rigid. That ability to be able to condition ourselves and everybody around us to be able to say, oh man, if I just get today's thing done, I'm free.

Yeah, I can go invest that time wherever the hell else I want. Is awesome if what you're, you know, if what we were saying was, I want you to take four hours for the work and get it done in two hours so I can give you four hours more work to get done in two hours, that that breaks, right? Because then you gotta realize when you compress time, you're also burning all of your focus. Right, and like we talked about before, that is definitely not linear. It's not anything close to it.

But on the other hand, if you spread your focus over like eight, 10 hours, that's way worse. I would rather have that focus put into exactly what I need to get done and say a two hour block, and then be able to take the next two hours off to do anything, take a nap for that matter than to try to spread it across four hours and have nothing to show for. Correct. Yeah. I think that's the thing, man, like the, the founder fantasy is like having 25 hours in a day.

The founder reality is that there's at least 10 of those are wasted, right? Yeah. You already have 'em. That's what you need to do, right? Stop chasing more hours and start respecting the ones you already have by doing something extremely useful with them. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone. You don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes.

Connect with bootstrap founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups.com community. Check out the startups.com community@www.startups.com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.