A Weekly Prioritization and Audit Framework for Entrepreneurs

Apple | Spotify | Youtube

Sponsor: Tacklebox

Got a startup idea and a full-time job? Probably time you gave it a real shot. Apply here.

This Newsletter + The Sunday Email:

We’ll send it out with each episode now with extra content, show notes, transcript, links. Hope it’s helpful.

And, here’s a thought from our weekly Member Sunday Email. Reply “Sunday” to get these.

• My Internal System: PARA

Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

The biggest challenge for the startups I’ve worked with is prioritization. Making time and holding time for the things that’ll actually set them apart.

Those things will shift as you grow, but the list of useful things is pretty short.

1. Interacting with customers

2. Selling to customers (and finding them)

3. Building internal systems to amplify everything you do

4. Reflection

The successful startups I’ve seen have tied each of those to a metric - interacting with customers might be as simple as 10 conversations a week. Selling is likely tied to leads or revenue. Internal systems is linked to time spent on durable tasks - things that can be repeated - versus fleeting tasks - things that’ll be useful once. Thinking is tied to time and diverse inputs. What you put in is what you spit out.

Today, we talk about a system on the pod to help you do those things. There are three initial steps:

1. Shifting everything to the calendar and living by it

2. Creating weekly progress reports and consistent audits to stay on track

3. Designing your environment to be default productive to save your willpower

We walk through this system with a little help from our friends in Finland. This is (hopefully) one of the most useful episodes we’ve ever released.

Enjoy!

Pod References

• Tacklebox

• Idea to Startup Newsletter

• Tom Eisenmann on Why Startups Fail

Pod Timestamps:

00:30 Intro
01:09 A Weekly Prioritization Framework
04:13 The Race to Five Pivots
05:49 Smooth Jazz
06:13 Finland has the most gold metals per capita
11:01 Prioritization System
13:27 Calendar
19:53 The Weekly Audit
22:53 Your Environment
25:30 A Quick Overview of the System

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re going to help you build out a weekly prioritization and execution framework to make sure you, and the thing you’re building, both reach your potential.

But to start, we’re going to look into the future.

To start today’s pod, we’re going to look into the future. Into a world where your startup was wildly successful, whatever that means to you.

This will actually be pretty easy.

We’ve had 400 companies go through the program since 2015 and what I think is maybe the most interesting side effect of watching that many idea stage founders build during their first 3-6 months is how all the successful companies kinda look the same and the all the unsuccessful companies look wildly different. The successful ones are successful because of a handful of things they do that all rhyme. The ones that didn’t work each have their own unique stories.

What I’m getting at is there’s a path early on that works and a whole bunch of paths that don’t. And the good path won’t happen by accident and, as with most things in the startup world, is counterintuitive. Or, more accurately, just not how most people work.

The path to a successful business has two drivers: strategy and tactics.

Strategy is the high-level vision.

Tactics are how you get there.

Strategy doesn’t change. Tactics change all the time.

So back to you.

It’s five or seven or ten years down the road and you’re on your favorite podcast talking about how you were able to be so successful. Maybe that’s this one. I hope it is.

The host asks the obvious first question:

“So, tell me about the early days. How’d you come up with this idea.”

You jump into a your well-worn story:

“Well, the idea first came to me while I was working at Deloitte. I realized that I worked with clients on the same things over and over and that 95% of the value could be delivered in 5% of the time. So, I took the money I’d saved, took six months off, and tried to build something to give smaller companies that couldn’t afford deloitte the 95% for way cheaper.

Unfortunately, that first idea never stuck. I thought small businesses would be pumped with this potential, but they didn’t care. Eventually, maybe too slowly - you add in a chuckle out of habit more than anything - I spent more time with customers and learned that, sure, this was a problem. But there was something way more pressing. And the more I spoke with customers about this new problem, the more excited I got. You know why? I’d solved for this at the company I was at BEFORE deloitte. But we never knew how impactful it was or how much our customers thought about it or how the real solution combined everything I’d learned.

So, I started consulting for a few companies, solving the problem manually on a small scale and building out process. It worked great. I learned more about how to solve it and how to find new customers and realized there was a huge business here. That’s when I found a cofounder, who filled the gaps - they’d built marketplaces in the past and knew how to get one started. The team and early traction let us raise a small round of funding, which got us more customers, which helped us learn how to find them quicker and what they really wanted. That let us get a lot of momentum and set us on our way.”

When you do tell your story on podcasts and things you’ll likely leave out the inevitable 3 to 4 other false starts that were between the first idea and the one that eventually worked. As our old friend Tom Eisenmann - still one of my favorite pods we’ve done, I’ll pop it in the show notes - says, startups are a race to 5 pivots. Very few companies build anything interesting before that.

Back to the successful businesses we’ve worked with.

None of them are being successful with their first idea. Or their second. Our most successful business, cruising themselves towards a 9 digit valuation, is building a product that barley rhymes with their first idea.

Startups are confounding. And this reason, maybe more than any other, is why I do what I do and why I love what I do and why I think you should start a business the right way no matter what. Because the first idea, the thing you want to build, is wrong. It’s probably not close. But the only way to get to the thing that’s right is to start the thing that’s wrong.

So many people wait for the perfect idea, which, again, is silly. Because you cannot recognize what’ll work until you’re knee deep in it. You need context and perspective that’s just not possible until you’re in the mix. You might think you’re the exception, but you’re not.

The skill entrepreneurs need is not picking an idea, it’s adapting, learning, changing, wiggling into the cracks of a problem like water into a stone.

And that’s what we’ll talk about today. How to set up your life so that you’re operating like a startup founder who will succeed. Who can start with something, learn fast, adjust, and get to that fifth idea that’ll let you build something people love.

Successful businesses are a side effect of working in a very specific way for an extended period of time.

And it all starts with a system, with prioritization, with strategy and tactics, and, weirdly, with the good people of Finland.

We’ll get you that system, after, a little smooth jazz.

Quick ad today and something for you.

The ad is for Tacklebox. If you’ve got a startup idea and a full-time job, apply at gettakclebox.com, we’ll get back to you in under 72 hours. . Use the code buildright to get 50% off your first month if accepted. We’ve helped over 400 people build businesses collectively worth over a billion dollars and I’ll guarantee you most of them started with less than you’ve got right now. Come join us if you’re working on something.

Now, something that might be helpful for you - I’m going to open my schedule for June 24th for rapid fire meetings. Head to gettacklebox.com, scroll down a bit to the Apply button, and right below it I’ll add a chat with us button. I have no idea how fast this will fill up, but I assume fairly fast? I opened the whole day. Excited to have rapid fire 1x1s and see if I can be helpful.

Ok, back to it. nh.

Finland has the most medals per capita of any country in Olympic history. They get a little over 2 medals from every million people. For comparison, the US gets just about 1 medal for every million people. The Fins get twice as many.

And also, if you’re listening and have an olympic medal, you’re one in a million. Congrats. And if you don’t think I did the math to see the likelihood of someone listening to this pod having an olympic medal, you just don’t know me. If you have one, please email, I need to know if I’m right.

Anyway, back to the question. How do the Fins get so many freaking medals?

You might say hey Brian, that’s skewed. Finland has mountains and they’re generally wealthy and so they probably win all the skiing medals. To which I’d say well, they actually win far more summer medals than winter medals.

They do win in skiing, but they also win in sailing and archery and wrestling and rowing and weightlifting and hockey and just about any other sport you can think of. And they win a lot.

The reason I bring this up is I’ve recently read a bunch of stuff about Finland, because they take a different approach to most countries in just about everything.

For example, every kid in Finland plays every sport. And they play a lot. School is broken up every hour by a mandatory 15 minutes of outdoor play. Also, kids don’t specialize in sports, even when they get older. Their best skiiers, the ones that won olympic medals, also played soccer and wrestled and cycled and swam.

Also, and here’s the thing that makes my physically flinch, when kids are little, they don’t keep score. Sports exist to have fun and to learn all sorts of other skills- winning isn’t top of the list, so they don’t worry about it.

This physically pains me, because I’m ridiculously competitive. I’m writing this from a coffee shop on 88th street and on the way from my apartment a block away to here I raced three people who had no idea we were racing. I gave a little fistpump when I won. I love to win. I love to compete. And I don’t like those being challenged, but Finland has done it. Because they don’t focus on winning, and yet they win… more.

Schools in Finland hurt my brain, too. I metioned the 15 minutes off every hour, but I didn’t mention that until the age of 7, there is no school. Kids just get together and play. There are no classes, no math, no english. And when kids do start school, they don’t get homework. And yet, Finland is consistently ranked as the best schools in the world.

What the hell is going on?

Exactly what you need to do with your startup.

You need to recognize the outcomes that you want, the outcomes that’ll be successful for you, and build the system to match. Finland does this. Nearly every other country doesn’t.

Finland wants their kids to be well-rounded, high functioning members of society. To do that, they prioritize learning how to work with other kids, how to interact and solve real problems, how to communicate. Because what’s more important than that?

To develop those skills, it’s far more effective to have kids play with one another, to use their imaginations, to figure stuff out - than to sit in their room repeating math problems. An article I read from someone schooled in Finland talked about how a common school activity might be sending a group of 8 year olds into the forest with a map and them working together to figure out how to get back.

Kids who specialize in something, say, skiing, from the time they’re 9 won’t be well adjusted adults. So, they don’t do that. And it turns out, breadth of skills win over specificity in the long-term. Just check out the medals in highly specified sports from athletes who didn’t focus solely on that sport.

I’m not saying to move to Finland or to tell your 5 year old not to do their homework or stop keeping score at little league. I obviously don’t know everything there is to know about Finland.

What I am saying, is that designing your surroundings to get an outcome you want is something we all overlook constantly. And, if you want to build something that matters, you should’t. Frankly, you can’t.

Exceptional results come from people with exceptional approaches. The bar for exceptional, in the working on a startup case, is fairly low. Because most other people’s approaches aren’t all that thoughtful. They track things that are easy to track and end up where that takes them.

Score in a soccer game is easy to track. Communication is not. Doesn’t mean score is more important than communication for the outcome you want.

This is just strategy and tactics.

Finland’s strategy is to create well-rounded people who can contribute to society.

Their tactics are constantly tweaked and tested to do just that.

And, as a side effect, they win a ton of medals and raise smart, successful kids. Because the types of people who win are the types of people they raise.

Now, let’s build your system.

The biggest challenge for the startups I’ve worked with is prioritization. Making time and holding time for the things that’ll actually set them apart.

Those things will shift as you grow, but the list is pretty short. It’s interacting with customers, selling to customers, building internal systems to amplify everything you do, and thinking. The successful startups I’ve seen have tied each of those to a metric to track - interacting with customers might be as simple as 10 conversations a week. Selling is likely tied to leads or revenue. Internal systems is linked to time spent on durable tasks - things that can be repeated - versus fleeting tasks - things that’ll be useful once. Thinking is tied to time and diverse inputs. What you put in is what you spit out.

As far as the sabateurs of that important work, it’s not going to be the obvious distractions. We all know social media and games and whatever else isn’t helping push you forward. It’s the stuff disguised as work - emails, posting for social media with the idea that you’re building a brand, conferences, pitching investors too early - that seem like you’re making progress but you aren’t.

We took our cue from the Fins and built the system to support the outcomes we really want. Which is, a founder that is thoughtful and intentional about what they do, that prioritizes and sticks to tasks that have disproportionate returns and create differentiators, and are incentivized by executing the process, not by arbitrary numbers. The system is built for the long haul. It’s built to get you through 5 pivots to a business that let’s you buy an island someday. Or just work for yourself.

The side effect of executing on this system is a successful startup.

There are three components, and we’ll talk high level through setting up each:

1. Shifting everything to the calendar and living by it

2. Creating weekly progress reports and consistent audits to stay on track

3. Designing your environment to be default productive to save your willpower

The strategy is to build a sustainable workflow that maximizes every second of time we work and spits out successful startups.

The core tactics are the three listed above. Now let’s make like everyone’s favorite finish olympic medal winning diver, Yrjo valkama, and jump in.

I got caught in a rabbit hole of Finnish olympians and I’ll tell you what - all that schooling didn’t help them figure out how to mix in a vowel here and there. Y-r-j-o is just a preposterous first name.

The key to the calendar has nothing to do with the calendar and everything to do with your to do list.

I think you should get rid of your to do list right now. The to do list is terrible. I lived most of my life by it and now that I don’t I can’t believe I ever did.

To do lists do a bunch of terrible things when you live by them.

First, they bloat. There’s no limit to how many things you put on a to do list, so you end up with hundreds of tasks. It ends up as a catchall, a place to dump ideas. You should have one of those, but it shouldn’t be the place you work from. Because then you get in the habit of having 20 things to do each day, finishing four, and feeling like you didn’t have a productive day. Or, you feel like it’s OK to just not finish your list, and then you’re lawless like those damn swedes - note, I know nothing about switzerland.

I’m kind of joking but mostly not. A brand is when someone makes a promise and keeps it repeatedly, and your personal brand - the one you see when you look in the mirror - will absolutely be tarnished if the promise you keep every day is that your to do list doesn’t get done. Startups are a funny place. There’s no one there to pat you on the back and say you’ve done a good job. Ever. Your only feedback will be that you didn’t finish what you said you would, every day. If you don’t think that weighs on you you’re an idiot, no offense.

The second terrible thing about a to do list is the feedback mechanism. Checking something off is way too satisfying. Especially if it dings and disappears. So, we try to get that feeling. Which means, do things fast. Which means, do things that aren’t important, usually. The important things take time. They take four hour blocks. It’s hard to break them down and usually a waste of time to do so. But we try to, so that we can feel the jolt of a checked box. It’s all wrong.

We may know that mapping out a quarterly marketing plan and responding to an email aren’t comparable, but our dopamine system doesn’t. And it wants that checked box.

Not having a to do list, however, feels uncomfortable. And since every human action is driven by one desire - to not be uncomfortable - we use them.

Until today.

When I switched from to do lists to the calendar my hours went down, the important stuff I got done doubled or tripled, and my sense of “completion” at the end of the day existed.

Here’s what I do now - and a ton of our startups do, as well.

I certainly keep a list of things I should do, either now or in the future. But I don’t work off it. I work off the calendar.

On Sunday, I sit down and map out the upcoming week’s schedule. I look through the to do list and think hard on a few questions:

• What’s most important for the business right now?

• What’s most important for the business long term?

• How would an incredible entrepreneur lay out their week?

• What are the things other people don’t make time for that I know great businesses do?

Then, I lay everything out. There are always a few meetings that I can’t get around, though I try to batch these as best I can. First, I think about my highest value times. I’m most creative, by far, in the mornings.

So 8 to 12 every day is sacred. It’s for the most important creative work. The differentiated stuff: The pod - thinking through it, writing it, growing it. And the Tacklebox membership - the new content, the responses to members, strategically thinking about their businesses.

Those get four hour slots, since switching between tasks has enormous cognitive cost.

Monday 8 to 12 might be 4 hours on podcast, tuesday 4 hours on getting more podcast listeners, thursday is speaking to customers, and friday is tacklebox growth. Wednesday is always held for full day work with current tacklebox members.

In the afternoon, I switch to stuff that doesn’t need my brain to be operating at 100%. I think about creative output as a cup of coffee, and after 4 good hours its usually 3/4 empty.

So, I grab tasks from the to do list and put them on my calendar for afternoons and timebox them. Nothing takes less than 15 minutes, and switching is hard, so I try to batch similar tasks. These might be more calls with members or startups I’m advising, it might be the admin and finance and legal work that comes with running a company, it might be editing podcasts or hiring or referrals or cold emails or any other task that moves my core metric.

The important thing is that these are all timeboxed on my calendar. So I see my day, know what I’m scheduled to do, and my check mark - my feedback loop - is simply whether I was engaged for the amount of time I said I’d be. If I’m trying to grow the podcast for four hours, and I’m engaged for those four hours, I get a big ole check mark. Even if what I wrote was dribble. Because the important part is showing up and working on the right stuff. The results are a side effect. The results come with consistency.

I try to work from 8 to 6 every day, and while some days spill later, it’s never unanticipated spill. It’s scheduled - there’s more that has to get done, and it has it’s time. This means that tasks that don’t make it to the calendar aren’t important. If they’re on the list and don’t make it on the calendar for a few weeks, they move into the ice box list, which I check every month or so. It also means my days have an end. Sometime to do lists never do, because the list is still full.

My calendar is done, and so am I.

When I look at my week as a whole, it tends to make sense. My goal is to look at it and say “that’s exactly how someone building an exceptional business over the long haul would spend their time.”

The last part of the calendar that’s been wildly important for me is printing out the daily view each day and having it next to me as I work. I make scratch notes throughout the day on how each block of time goes. More specifically, I note when I get off track. Not in a way that’s cruel - I don’t shame myself for checking ESPN - it’s more about understanding why I’m getting distracted.

Distraction comes from uncertainty. So, what was it about the thing I’m doing that I’m not sure about? How can I clear it up? Sometimes I’m just running away from thinking about something deeply, and I need to refocus. Sometimes I’m just burnt.

I’ll also write when I get on a roll, or when something specific happens that pushes me forward. You always hear about working on your business not in your business. this is the start of that.

These notes help for the next pillar, which are the…

Weekly progress reports and audits.

You need these no matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey.

If you’re a solo founder, particularly one working on your business on the side, you really need weekly progress reports.

I schedule these for Friday afternoons, and it’s time that cannot be pushed. Figuring out what you’ve done and figuring out how to do better next week is the most important thing you can be doing. This is a long game, and continuous progress is the name of it. Thinking about what you work on is something most people skip. It sets them back.

There are two components of the weekly audit.

The first is the stack of calendars you’ve got. Look through them and see how you did. Where did you get off track, what needed to get pushed, what snuck it’s way onto your calendar that didn’t deserve your time. I look at the week as a whole and ask myself three questions:

• What should I have done more of?

• What should I get rid of?

• What did I enjoy the most?

You’ll take these into account when you draft up the next week.

Next is my weekly progress document.

This has two parts. First, the thing that’s most important right now. That might be growing revenue or pod subs or talking to current members or getting new obes.

The second part is looking at the week and deciding if those tasks impacted the headline objective.

If sales was the most important thing for me this week and I spent 2 of 50 hours on it… that doesn’t really seem like I’m treating it that way.

I go back through the week and rank whether the tasks helped me move towards my core objective. I rank these activities as having a high impact on the goal, a medium impact, or a low/no impact.

Where this gets tricky is when things you’re doing might be a degree or two away from the goal. So, writing a podcast might help with getting more customers eventually, but it didn’t do it this week. Our goal is to connect those two to understand the actual impact of the things we do on the outcomes we want.

What I love about this is how it moves you away from numbers that you can obsess over in a vaccuum and moves you towards actionable stuff.

I do have four questions I ask each week, and revisit the previous couple of week’s answers during each review:

• What was my focus for the week?

• What is my current biggest obstacle to growth?

• What were my biggest learnings?

• How am I feeling?

These ground me and make sure things are continuing to move forward. It also focuses me on the right numbers and questions.

On any given week the podcast might have way more or way fewer downloads than average. It’s easy for me to continually look at that number and get excited or upset about it. But the real thing to look at is the actions that impacted that number. If I didn’t do anything this week that would drive downloads higher, and nothing in the past three weeks that would do it, I can’t really get upset when downloads aren’t high.

Nearly everything in the startup world is a lagging indicator, and nothing in the startup world happens without you forcing it to happen. So it’s focused work, over time.

Seth Godin talks about the famous Dolly Parton quote Be who you are and do it on purpose, and he says the key is to actually flip it.

Do the work purposefully and you’ll figure out who you are.

That’s what this framework helps you do.

—

The last pillar of the process is your environment.

The most important thing to know here is that your environment, like your weeks, need to be built on purpose.

Things will distract you. Maybe it’s espn or email or youtube. There are tools to neuter those. All of them. Don’t rely on your willpower to do it.

The first step is to notice. Whenever you get disctracted, write it down on your printed out calendar. Don’t get mad, just note it.

At the end of the day, look back.

Did you check your email 20 times an hour in case a customer you need to reply to emailed? Set up notifications in gmail so that you get pinged for new inbound messages or time sensitive messages from customers and nothing else.

Checking LinkedIn? Use a tool like BlockSite or freedom or whatever else to monitor / disable your usage. Check Instagram too often? Delete your password and give it to a friend and force them to give it to you for you to check. You’ll feel like a jackass.

Look at your phone throughout the day? Ask someone in your office or coworking space to hold it for you every morning until lunch and then until 6. Or, if you live in an apartment and work from home, lock it in your mailbox downstairs.

The big message here is do not waste your willpower on stuff you can design away. You can make the default no distractions. Make it hard to do, make yourself feel ugly doing it, make it the opposite of natural. Your habit will break fast.

The bigger thing I’ve gotten value from here is that log on your daily calendar. Every time your instincts are to check instagram, don’t beat yourself up over it. Be curious. Why do you want to check? Are you unsure of what you’re supposed to be doing? Are your goals not clear? Have you just lost steam?

Other environmental tricks are useful, too. Every hour I get a notification to breathe for 2 minutes. 5 seconds in, 5 second hold, 5 seconds out, 5 second hold. For 2 minutes. Couldn’t be more helpful.

There are TONS of environmental tricks and tactics and I’d try them all. This is where you’re a mad scientist. This stuff can really work. Don’t settle - again - make sure your life is on purpose. A successful startup won’t just fall into your lap.

That was a lot of talk for something that’s fairly straightforward. Here it is broken out.

Get rid of your to do list and put everything you do in your calendar. It’ll force you to focus on the right stuff, realize how long things take you to complete, and be more purposeful with your time. Tasks that aren’t important won’t make it onto the calendar and that’s the way it should be.

Print out your calendar each day and mark up how the blocks of time went.

Audit the days each week with a few key questions to make sure the tasks you’re doing are the types of tasks a successful entrepreneur at your stage would do.

Purposefully design and tweak your environment to get to a default state of productive work.

And don’t beat yourself up when this stuff doesn’t work on the first try. It’s a process. And that’s the point. Just being thoughtful around it will give you 10x returns on your time.

The way to be successful is to repeatedly do the things that lead to differentiated, unique territory. Whatever you’re doing now, especially if it’s random and haphazard, won’t lead to that.

Amateurs do things when the mood strikes them. Professionals do things when they said they would. Be a pro. Amateurs don’t start successful startups.

And if none of that works, you can always just move to finland. Although a quick google search tells me that’s not actually true. Seems like visas are… pretty tough.

But you can do the reset of the stuff. Good luck with it, let me know how it goes,

And, obviously, we do all this stuff at Tacklebox in the membership. We’ll help get you set up - apply at gettacklebox.com. We get back to you in 72 hours. You could be working on this stuff with us by Wednesday.

Have a great week!