Productivity and Startups Don’t Mix

As a startup founder, you want to be productive. After all, you often have to do multiple things by yourself. You’re the lunch lady, debugger, handyman, visionary, marketer, and many, many more. So naturally, you would want to follow some sort of rule like GTD or Pomodoro to really squeeze every ounce of productivity from your day.

But that doesn’t work.

Startups do weird stuff all the time, most of which only have a slight chance of being useful. Checking email at all times, lurking in online forums, and replying to chat seem like huge time wasters but they can extremely valuable to a startup who is validating an idea.

On the other end, building a new login page, creating a sales process or making a go-to market strategy look like fruitful endeavors but might be the big time sinks since you’ll never sure if these big projects will be useful in the long run.

For new startups, their goal is a hazy vision in the distance. The first order of business should be to remove the haze, not to step forward.