Startups: The Need for Purpose and Productivity

Working in the startup arena can be overwhelming because it is often a case of too few hands on deck responsible for so many things. The sheer busyness of everyday can be distracting from the most important goals your startup started out set to accomplish, especially if one of your goals was to help people in some way.
Don’t Lose Sight of the Real Purpose
The truth is that to have sustained success, you have to have a heart for helping people. In business, I talk about caring unapologetically. I talk about making a contribution unapologetically. I talk about creating value before claiming any because I really think those things are important.
All of us do two things in this life: we wake up, and we grow up.
That is the path all of us are on. People who choose to wake up start to realize that the greatest satisfaction and fulfillment you get is helping other people achieve their goals. The more people you touch, the more people you help, the more satisfying your work. That is the waking up part: realizing it isn’t about you but it’s about the contribution you make. This is as true in the startup world as it is anywhere. Maybe more so.
That makes it easy for people to see you as a collaborator. They know your heart is in it, you’re not self oriented, you are other oriented, and that you really want to help.
Developing Productivity Habits
If you were to look at your life and understand the number of inputs you have coming at you, emails coming at you asking for help or action, phone calls, texts, messenger, you would be astounded at how much is asked of you. When you are working in a lean environment, this can be crippling. You need a process to keep track of your commitments.
David Allen said,
What deserves your attention is what most has your attention.
We have all of these things vying for our attention, and you have to figure out a process for touching base on the commitments you make and the things coming into your life. I break this into two pieces. Every Saturday morning I tackle my physical inbox and I scan it into Evernote. I send things to Omnifocus. I don’t decide what I’m going to do, I just collect it.
I separate it and make a decision about how it will be handled. Should I just say no because it isn’t aligned with my primary vision? Should I delegate so that someone else is managing it? Or, should I handle it?
This allows me to not let other people’s priorities bombarding my inbox dictate my day to day life. I’m going to decide when I can get back to them and how I can get back to them. I give myself time to decide what I’m going to do and when I’m going to do it. It is a really difficult discipline to begin, but once you have and you slip for a week you realize exactly how crazy your life was before you adopted this process.
Don’t Be Fooled By False Urgency
Very often email looks like it’s urgent, but it is only urgent for the sender. There is a difference between urgent and important. If you spend your time on urgent things because of someone else’s deadline, and it doesn’t align with your most important goals, you are responding to false urgency.
The risk when you go to the urgent issues first means you’re skipping over your productivity list. You need to make sure you remain very clear about what you are trying to do. It’s tough to say no, but when you say no to small things you make it possible to say yes to big things.
If you get clear about what is important, you have more choice about how you spend your time.
This is true of your clients or investors as well when they dig into your important time with their urgent requests. They want to feel important and be reminded that you value them. Sometimes you need to make a decision to put their urgent off to focus on your important.
This is where you need to be strong, and professionally and politely refuse to jump at a client’s request because you are focused on your own important work. Sometimes that requires you to disappoint clients, but in the end you’ll be running a business much better equipped to serve them well.
