11 tips from startup founders and entrepreneurs — how to cut the crap out of your day, stay sane, and get stuff done

This week, at the Lean Startup Circle Unconference in San Francisco, I asked a collection of roughly 20 startup founders, students, and startup enthusiasts what they are doing about “time.”

Specifically: how is everyone managing the overwhelming demands on their time?

Here’s a summary from that discussion:

1. Protect your time by mastering your calendar. If something gets on your calendar, it is more likely to get done.

2. Paul Graham wrote a great article about the maker’s schedule and the manager’s schedule. Read it. If you are a startup founder, you probably alternate between building things and managing people over the course of a typical day. You probably have people working for you who fit more into a maker’s schedule, and others who fit more into a manager’s schedule. Block off time for building and developing your product. Block off time for talking with customers or the people you work with.

3. Don’t let others constantly interrupt you with their personal priorities. Set your own priorities based on the things that really matter. Time spent improving your product, talking with customers, or developing new partnerships and collaborations outside your company tends to be time well spent.

4. Use the Pomodoro technique. Identify an important task. Set a timer for an interval of 25 minutes. Then focus exclusively on that task for the entire 25 minute interval. Do not let yourself get distracted with other work or email coming in. When you finish that interval, take a break for a 3 to 5 minutes. Then start up your next task with another 25 minute Pomodoro. After 4 Pomodori, take a longer break of, say, 15–30 minutes. Frequent breaks can increase mental agility. You might get better results if you use a physical Pomodoro timer rather than a digital timer on your computer or phone.

5. Read books on productivity. For example, read Getting Things Done by David Allen. And read Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

6. If you are launching a new startup or a major new project, talk with your family and how it will impact them. Make sure your spouse, or kids, or other loved ones, all understand how big this is, and how it will probably take away from the time you would normally spend with them.

7. The group agreed that you don’t want to go to the extreme, and neglect your family — even if you are very career minded, ambitious, and have high standards for your work and performance. Marissa Mayer had a baby not long after being appointed as Yahoo’s CEO. (No one can argue that Mayer lacks drive and ambition.)

8. Our parents did not have to deal with some of the complexity and overwhelming information we process in today’s world. But if you had entrepreneurial parents, the example they set for you, in terms of personal priorities, might have shaped you into the person you are today, without you realizing it. For example, my dad was a solopreneur for almost all of his career. He ran his own law practice and invested in a lot of real estate in Peoria, IL. But he always made time for fishing, reading, hanging out with family, and playing chess, etc. He set an example that helps me stay balanced today as I launch my management consultancy and my new book.

9. Identify your bad habits that steal time from your big priorities. Maybe you like to read a lot of tech news, and that’s taking time away from stuff that really matters. You can set a specific period of time aside every day for just reading news, then finish with it, and move into really productive work.

10. The “Eat that Frog” method is powerful. Start your day by identifying the least pleasant tasks of the day. Then do them first. You might have more energy and be in a better mood if you get the least pleasant tasks (i.e., the frogs) out of the way first thing.

11. You can collect all sorts of good time management practices but the hard part is implementing them consistently.

From our talk, I saw how much startup founders care about productivity and results. Entrepreneurs have an aggressive work ethic. But they are as human as the rest of us. We all need rest. The aggressive work ethic can lead us to neglect the time needed for recovery and rest. 80 hour weeks are not the solution. In summary, it seems that successful entrepreneurs:

1. have learned how to maintain an aggressive work ethic with a focus on results

2. have learned how to build recovery periods into their day

3. have learned good habits for setting priorities and protecting their time

4. get adequate amounts of sleep and downtime

5. spend meaningful time with friends, family and loved ones

There’s no silver bullet for time management. A technique that works for one person does not work for everyone. Try different methods for setting clear priorities, and watch how they affect your productivity.

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Gale Stafford is a management consultant and author of The Talent Formula.

Image credit: (c) 2009 Piotr Mamnaimie under Creative Commons License