Aurora's Vest

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Artists shouldn't network

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In summary

Revenue and active users are the most important factors in starting a successful business. You should always be working on things that impact these on a weekly basis.

This usually means that you should be doing the things with the highest impact:

Talking to users, and

Building product

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One last thing

Make decisions thoughtfully and move fast. The faster you can move, the quicker you’ll find what works.

It’s better to make a mistake and learn quickly, than it is to twiddle and work on low value stuff until an Aha! Moment shows up. So, don’t be afraid to make a mistake.

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Is it working?

Ultimately, you will know you're prioritizing your time well when you are hitting your weekly goals consistently.

Insert Graph 1

Insert Graph 2

If your graphs look like Graph 2 and you want to make it look more like Graph 1, try the following:

Write weekly updates and be honest about it.

The key components of these Weekly Updates are:

Primary indicator of success for the week: Actual vs Intended

If the goal was not met, what was the biggest obstacle to growth?

What did you do? What Impact did you predict? What was the actual impact?

What did you learn?

Set aside time to review your weekly updates.

Pull up all the weekly reviews, from the first one to the last one before this review.

Quarterly, for example

Things to pay attention to during these reviews:

Do you feel like you are learning fast enough?

How well did you predict the impact of the tasks you did?

Did you let low value work or fake progress creep in to your weekly work?

Are there blockers to growth that show up consistently?

Are you completing tasks in a timely manner?

Why is this review important?

It’s easy to get into the rut of not learning anything new so a lot of people end up doing the same thing over and over again. Looking back at these weekly reviews helps you break free from that loop.

If, on the other hand, you thought a task could be completed in a week, but you find yourself constantly running out of time, try these suggestions:

Break the task down into smaller tasks

Tinker with your schedule using a modified version of Paul Graham’s Maker Schedule, Manager’s schedule http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

The premise of the article is that different tasks place different demands on our cognition and the cost of switching from one context to another can be costly. 

For example, meeting with a client, writing a report and figuring out how to  help a client- these are all tasks that are non-trivial but require different types of work. So, scheduling all three types in one day ends up with time wasted because of the cost involved in switching from task to task.

This is especially important for solo teams- you don’t have the luxury of working with others so your time is especially precious.

Finney's tip: block off a specific chunk of time for each task you decide to take on during the week. A more nuanced approach involves learning the difference between time blocking and time boxing.

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Good to go!

Given that your objective is to hit your weekly goal, when you pull tasks from your list, pull them in order of:

High Impact/Easy Complexity

High Impact/Medium Complexity

Steer away from tasks that are Low Impact/High Complexity.

DON’T do too many things.

This will stop you from getting much  done in the way of making progress, from week to week.

DO pull enough tasks to complete with conviction during the given week.

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A few tips

*it's a mistake to build a feature before talking to a client who has the problem

Key tip on building out these solutions:

DON'T do them right away because it will cause whiplash.

DO

- log them in your spreadsheet,

- pull up your spreadsheet every week and go through every item.

- Grade them on

a. Impact, and

b. Complexity

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A Dream Deferred

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Choose your adventure carefully

Grade the ideas in your backlog by Impact & Compexity

Grading by impact

1. High impact - you think that there is a high probability that this will help you meet your weekly goals

2. Medium - you're not sure if it will help with the weekly goal, but with more capability, you can meet your weekly goal

3. Low - low probability to meet weekly goal

Note that these are all relative to what else is on the list.

It's actually easy to grade by impact, which is why the exercise is important to do, no matter the pedantry involved.

Grading by Complexity

- Hard: cannot be completed in a week

- Medium: can be completed in half a day

- Easy: it can be done in less than a day

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Why talking to users?

Why the focus on talking to users?

Because talking to users helps convert them to paying customers, which translates to revenue.

It will help you figure out if you're on the right track or not. And that, in turn, will help you figure out the product's road map.

From the road map, come opportunities to solve problems for the users.

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Key Concepts I

Backlog (Youtube reel) - a list of every thing that needs to get done so that nothing falls through the cracks.

Iterate (Reddit discussion)

At the start-up phase, it is important that you tinker and "do things that don't scale".

It's also ok to optimize metrics for things you find that yield results.

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Keep notes

Keep a spread sheet of ideas that will move your primary indicators forward.

Ask yourself "Are these tasks related to talking to users, or building product?"

If not, ask yourself:

a. is this fake progress? If yes, put this in the Should-Not-Do bucket

b. is it a different, but related problem? If yes, make a note of it.

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More or less?

Would you rather look back at your work week to find that you checked of a lot of tasks or would you prefer to check off fewer?

(It is human to feel good about a long list of checked off items).

Watch for the natural human instinct to do low value work because it's easier.

I takes time, thought & discipline to prevent this habit of building on auto-pilot.

That's why this exercise, no matter how pendatic, is important.

Test: You should be able to say what you are doing with your time, if somebody asks “What are you doing?”

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To time box or time block?

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A Challenge: Examine Your Time

"There are hundreds of things you can be doing to to increase your primary indicators of progress - is what you're working on right now the best way to meet your weekly goals or have you tricked yourself into doing something else?

If you're skeptical about how easy it is to trick yourself, here is an experiment you can run to prove the challenge false:

Take one week and over the course of your working hours, keep a journal of what you worked on hour by hour.

Be honest with yourself about what you thought the impact would be on your primary indicators before you start.

Are you surprised by how much low impact work you accomplished?

If you are honest about the impact and surprised by the results: the reason this happens is because people like what is familiar, especially in the face of uncertainty and so we go on auto-pilot.

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Key Concept - Systems

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The Goal

“Your goal is not to protect your ego. It is to make actual progress.” - Adora Cheung

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Key Concept - Tinker

The best way to gain from disorder is to tinker - trial & error - as opposed to picking up knowledge.