Lesson 2: Manage yourself first.

Five things you want to master before anything else + the tools that help

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When you start working on your startup idea a.k.a. when you become a founder, you naturally get very enthusiastic and/or overwhelmed. Both cloud your vision and prevent you from making progress on things that move the needle.

Building a startup from scratch usually means not having the human, social, and financial resources you need to build what you want. This automatically means you have no time either, as you’re the one who has to gather all these resources. Often, while still working a full-time job. In order to do that, you’ve got to develop your startup idea further and have a clear vision, so you can attract and convince the right people to help you.

How do you solve that chicken-n-egg riddle?

When workload increases disproportionately to the time you have for it, a common reaction is to try and fit more tasks into those 24 hours you have. However, just working longer can lead to exhaustion and not really bring you much closer to where you want to go. Be it just because your to-do-list consistently gets longer, too.

Obviously, you want to become way more efficient than you had to be in your previous chapter, where you were just working a full-time job. Here’s what the need for efficiency teaches you along the way.

Speed

You become faster by aiming to get more work done in less time. You start thinking and acting quicker. A nice side effect of this is that you gradually destroy perfectionism, as you don’t have the time to perfect things when your priority is to validate your assumptions and make progress. You get familiar with the Lean Startup Methodology, and learn to move forward with minimum effort, so you can actually figure out how to build a sustainable business in the first place. That’s where your steep learning curve kicks into gear.

Prioritization

You start prioritizing and developing the ability to discern the few vital activities from the unimportant many. Then, you allocate more time to these important tasks, and less time to the less important tasks. The more you do that, the more you train your brain to do it, so it eventually starts happening automatically. When a non-essential item appears, you try to get it out of your way ASAP, so you can make time for the crucial stuff. That’s why founders usually respond within an hour – they don’t let emails pile up and create clutter. This is called inbox zero and it’s a prerequisite for efficient management.

Task Management

The process of constant assessment and categorization of your endless tasks, ideas, requests etc. becomes the way you operate. If it doesn’t, you’re surely not making real progress. A best practice here is the GTD system, outlined in the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen.

Essentialism

However, the further you advance, the more complex things get. Each new stage of development brings its own areas of work and responsibility. Latest when you have team members on board, ‘firefighting’ might fill up your days and make you lose track of your long-term goals. That’s where a concept called Essentialism comes to save you. It teaches you that:

Determining what is important requires discipline in scanning and filtering conflicting and competing information, options, opinions, and facts that clamor for your attention. It doesn’t mean hearing the loudest, but noticing what’s not being talked about.

Essentialism is about deliberately creating space to work on your top priority. It teaches you to keep the main thing the main thing. Which means blocking time and removing all distractions. It’s a system that helps you shift from an employee to an employer mindset and develop as a leader.

Leadership

One of the first things you understand on the founder's journey is that leadership is self-leadership first. You’ve got to be able to lead and manage yourself first before you can lead and manage other people and their processes effectively.

Your business can only grow to the extent that you do, and your team cannot be more efficient than you are. You set the tone for everything. The way you think and operate is directly reflected in your business. Therefore, the first thing to manage and optimize is yourself.

Finally, all five things can take a long time to adopt, as they typically suggest deep personal transformation. Patience and a sharp focus on progress (meaning an appreciation of every baby step you take;) help enormously along the way.

This post is part of the series “100 things I learned by becoming an entrepreneur” that I launched to reflect on my founder journey, nudge fellow founders to appreciate their own progress, and inspire more women to make the leap to entrepreneurship. Subscribe to get all hard-earned lessons featuring helpful tips & tools delivered to your inbox as soon as I hit publish ???