How to prioritise your time as a founder

Executive overview

Time burns money, and most founders waste it on tasks that don't move their primary KPI. The fix is a simple two-dimensional framework: grade every task by impact (high/medium/low) and complexity (easy/medium/hard), then always execute high-impact, easy tasks first.

Talking to users and building product are almost always the only two levers that matter. Everything else is fake progress.

The goal is not to feel busy — it is to grow your primary KPI every week.

Real vs fake startup progress

• Real progress means directly growing your primary KPI — almost always revenue or active users.
• Fake progress is everything founders convince themselves is useful: conferences, awards, network events, vanity metrics.
• Each task should be filtered through one question: does this directly help hit this week's KPI goal?
• The two highest-leverage activities are talking to users and building product — nothing else.

The impact-complexity prioritisation system

• Keep a spreadsheet of every idea that could move your primary KPI.
• Write ideas down immediately; don't switch to them — constant context-switching kills weekly progress.
• Grade each task on impact: High (likely to hit weekly goal), Medium (possible), Low (unlikely).
• Grade each task on complexity: Easy (under a day), Medium (one to two days), Hard (many days).
• Always prioritise High-Easy first, then High-Medium.
• Avoid Low-Hard combinations entirely — low probability of success, high time cost.
• Pick only as many tasks as you can complete well; doing too many means finishing nothing.

Why low-value work creeps in

• Humans default to autopilot; we gravitate toward easy, checklist-filling tasks that feel productive.
• Journal every hour of your past week and rate the actual KPI impact — most founders are surprised.
• Awareness alone prevents most drift; the rest takes discipline.
• Technical founders especially default to building before talking to users — the framework forces the right order.

Measuring whether you're prioritising correctly

• The clearest signal is whether you're hitting weekly goals consistently.
• Write weekly updates with: goal set, goal achieved (yes/no), biggest blocker, predicted vs actual impact, key learning.
• Review all updates periodically — look for slow learning, repeated blockers, or fake progress creeping back in.
• If you're always running out of time, the task was likely harder than graded — break it into smaller pieces.

The maker/manager schedule

• High context-switching between coding and user meetings is expensive — ramping back up wastes time.
• Batch similar work: dedicate full days (or half-days) to coding, separate blocks to user conversations.
• Solo founders especially need to structure this deliberately — no team to absorb the switching cost.

Moving fast beats choosing perfectly

• Speed of learning matters more than selecting the perfect task upfront.
• A founder who picks the wrong task, learns quickly, and pivots beats one who deliberates and stalls.
• Indecision is itself a form of time waste.
• The faster you prove (or disprove) product-market fit, the faster you can scale.