24 Hours

If you’ve worked at a startup or founded your own, you understand the pressure of deadlines. The getting punched and bruised in a mental fashion from the moment you start work until the moment you leave. Then going back at it again. And again. And again. Time and time again, we put in a full day of work, call it in, go home, sleep, and repeat. This is the cycle of reality and the cycle starts over every 24 hours.

It’s funny. We all have the exact same amount of time every single day. Each of us has a daily allowance of 1,440 minutes and we spend all of it until the next allowance comes in. How is it then that we all end up in different places? If you observe two different people for every single minute of a day, you’d be surprised with either how much they get done, or how little. However, it’s not always about the quantity of work that gets done. You could knock out a lot of items on your list, but still not have a really productive day.

It all goes back to priorities. You only provide value in a startup when you can deliver the most urgent action items within a given time frame. If your priorities aren’t align with this statement, you are essentially costing the company money and costing yourself time. You have to ruthlessly prioritize your time and efforts to action items that deliver value. If you’re in sales, that means setting up customer calls, reaching out to leads, and following up on clients to get them over the signature hump. If you’re in consulting, that means setting up meetings with your clients, providing them the necessary resources on demand, and staying in constant communication. If you’re a Product Manager, that means obsessing over the backlog, checking in on the team during standups, and removing any blockers that come their way in order for them to perform at their best. Anything else either provides neutral or negative value.

Planning your day is extremely valuable in how you manage your 1,440 minutes. Do you sleep in? Do you eat breakfast? Do you watch over your calendar the night before and the day of to stay on top of deadlines and deliverables? Going with the flow here is not going to cut it. If you have a vision for where you want to be, you have to be able to cut that vision into smaller time chunks and apply metrics to those chunks to ensure that you’re on track.

Each set of 24 hours is like a brick. If you’re able to sleep at night knowing you provided enough value to yourself, your startup, and others around you, you deserve a brick. With enough bricks over time, you can eventually lay the foundation for what your vision will be built upon. It’s all about the small steps here.