Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time
Summary
TLDRこのビデオスクリプトでは、スタートアップを成功させるために時間を優先順位付けする方法について解説しています。重要なのは、実際のビジネス成長に貢献するタスクを特定し、優先順位をつけることです。主な指標(KPI)の成長に最も影響を与えるタスクを特定し、週ごとの目標を達成するための高影響力、低複雑性のタスクを優先します。また、週次進捗報告を通じてタスクの選択と優先順位付けを評価し、時間を無駄にしないスケジュールを組むことが求められます。重要なのは迅速な意思決定と、間違った選択をしても素早く学び直し、正しい方向に進むことです。
Takeaways
- 🕒 時間を大切にしよう - スター tupは時間が貴重で、その使い方で成功の可能性が決まる。
- 📈 実際の進歩と偽の進歩を区別する - 実際のビジネス成長に貢献するものに注目し、それ以外は避ける。
- 🎯 主要なKPIを目指せ - 周囲の成長を示すために、主なKPIを設定し、それに向けたタスクに集中する。
- 🗓 週ごとの目標を設定する - 週ごとの目標を設定し、それに沿ったタスクを優先的に選択する。
- 📝 タスクリストを管理する - 常に更新されたタスクリストを保ち、優先度の高いものから取り組む。
- 🔍 価値のあるタスクを見つける - 価値のあるタスクを特定し、それらを優先的に実行する。
- 📊 影響と複雑さを評価する - タスクの影響と複雑さを評価し、最も効果的な順に優先度をつける。
- 📈 週ごとの進歩を追跡する - 週ごとの目標達成状況を追跡し、進歩を評価する。
- 🚫 低い価値のタスクを避ける - 自動操縦モードに陥らず、低価値のタスクを避け、時間の無駄を省く。
- 🔄 スケジュールを調整する - 高いコンテキスト切り替えコストがあるタスクには連続した時間を割く。
- 🏁 素早く動く - 素早く意思決定し、間違いを犯してもすぐに学び直し、次のステップへ進む。
Q & A
アドラはどのような立場でスピーチをしているのですか?
-アドラはY Combinator(YC)のパートナーであり、スタートアップの時間管理に関するアドバイスを提供しています。
スタートアップにとって時間とはどのような意味を持つものですか?
-スタートアップにとって時間は貴重なもので、お金を燃やすことでもなく、ビジネスを維持する基本的な要素です。
アドラはどのようにしてタスクを優先順位付けするべきかを説明していますか?
-はい、アドラはタスクを優先順位付けする方法について説明しており、それがスタートアップの成功に重要な影響を与えると述べています。
「本当のスタートアップの進歩」と「偽のスタートアップの進歩」とは何を意味していますか?
-「本当のスタートアップの進歩」とは、スタートアップの主要なKPIを成長させることに焦点を当てた活動のことです。一方、「偽のスタートアップの進歩」とは、実際の顧客価値提供に直接関係しない活動を指しています。
アドラはなぜタスクリストを保持することが重要だと述べていますか?
-タスクリストは新しいアイデアを記録し、優先順位を付けるための重要なツールであり、時間管理の効率を高めるのに役立ちます。
アドラはタスクをどのように評価し、優先順位を付けるべきかを提案していますか?
-アドラはタスクを「高い」「中程度」「低い」の3つのレベルに分類し、それに基づいて優先順位を付けるべきだと提案しています。
タスクの「影響」と「複雑さ」という2つの次元はどのように関連していますか?
-「影響」と「複雑さ」はタスクの優先順位を決定する際に重要な2つの次元であり、高影響で複雑なタスクは優先されますが、低影響で複雑なタスクは避けるべきです。
アドラは週ごとの目標を達成するためにどのようにタスクを選ぶべきかを説明していますか?
-アドラは高影響で簡単なタスクから始め、次に高影響で中程度の複雑さのタスクに進むべきだと説明しています。
アドラはどのようにして時間管理を改善し、進歩を促すとアドバイスしていますか?
-アドラは週ごとのアップデートを書くこと、タスクを細分化すること、そしてスケジュールを再構成することなど、時間管理を改善するための具体的なアドバイスを提供しています。
アドラはなぜ迅速な意思決定が重要だと述べていますか?
-迅速な意思決定は、スタートアップが市場に適しているものを構築しているかどうかを早く検証し、適切な方向へ進むための鍵となります。
Outlines
🕒 スタートアップの時間管理
アドラは、YCのパートナーとしてスタートアップの時間管理について話します。スタートアップでは時間は貴重で、資金を燃やし続ける状況下で、機会費用が常にあります。重要なのは、最も影響力のあるタスクを特定し、優先順位をつけることです。多くの創業者はこれがうまくいっていないとアドラは指摘。実際の時間管理とは、24時間をどのように割り当てるかではなく、スタートアップにどれだけの時間を割り当てるかを意味します。アドラはタスクリストの作成と、それを通じて実際のスタートアップ進歩と偽の進歩を区別することが重要だと語ります。実際の進歩は、主にKPIの成長を示すことです。
📈 優先度の高いタスクの特定
アドラは、タスクの優先順位を決める方法について説明します。まず、タスクの影響力を評価し、週ごとの目標達成にどの程度貢献するのかを判断します。次に、タスクの複雑さを_easy_, _medium_, _hard_の3つのレベルに分類します。これにより、タスクを効果的に並べ替え、週の目標を達成するのに最も重要なタスクに集中することができるようになります。また、タスクをこなすのにかかる時間を考慮し、週内に達成可能な範囲内でのタスクを選択することが重要です。
📊 時間配分とタスクの優先順位
アドラは、時間配分とタスクの優先順位を設定する具体的な方法を提案します。週ごとの目標を設定し、達成できたかどうかを週次更新レポートで誠実に評価することが肝心です。また、タスクの影響力と複雑さを組み合わせて、優先度を決定します。高影響力で簡単なタスクから始め、次に高影響力で中程度の複雑性のタスクに移るのが良いとアドラはアドバイスします。
🚀 迅速な意思決定と行動
最後にアドラは、迅速な意思決定と行動の重要性を強調します。スタートアップでは早くも何が求められているかを証明し、市場とのフィットを確立することが大切です。間違った選択をしても、素早く学び直し、正しい方向に進むことができる人は、適切なタスクを選択するために時間を無駄に過ごす人よりも優れているとアドラは結びます。
Mindmap
Keywords
💡スタートアップ
💡時間管理
💡優先順位
💡主要KPI
💡フェイクなスタートアップ進歩
💡タスクリスト
💡ユーザーとのコミュニケーション
💡製品開発
💡週ごとの目標
💡タスクの優先順位付け
Highlights
Time is precious, especially for startups, as it directly relates to financial burn and opportunity costs.
The importance of prioritizing tasks that have the most impact on a startup's progress.
Defining 'real' startup progress as activities that directly contribute to growth, particularly in primary KPIs.
The primary KPIs are often revenue or active users, and setting weekly goals for these is crucial.
Differentiating between real progress and 'fake' startup progress, such as attending conferences or focusing on awards.
The experiment of journaling daily activities to identify low-value work and its impact on KPIs.
Keeping a spreadsheet of ideas that can move the primary KPI and grading them based on impact.
Tasks involving talking to users and building product are usually high-impact activities.
Avoiding the common mistake of technical founders to build first and then seek user feedback.
Grading tasks based on impact and complexity to determine prioritization.
Focusing on high-impact and easy tasks first, then moving to medium complexity tasks.
The importance of not trying to do everything at once and picking tasks that can be completed well.
Consistently hitting weekly goals as an indicator of effective time prioritization.
Writing weekly updates to track progress and identify blockers to growth.
Reviewing past weekly updates to improve task selection and prioritization.
Breaking down complex tasks into smaller, manageable ones to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
Adopting a modified maker-manager schedule to reduce context switching and increase productivity.
The value of moving fast and making decisions quickly, even if they might be wrong, to learn and adapt.
Transcripts
hello as kevin said my name is adora i'm
one of the partners at yc
and i'm going to talk about how to
prioritize time
time as you know is precious especially
when you're working on a startup
time burns money and money is the very
basic thing
that keeps a startup alive not to be too
philosophical about it but even if your
personal burn is super low
you can eat ramen days on end which i
don't suggest and you don't have to pay
yourself for a very long time there's
always a high opportunity cost
to doing your startup so it's super
important
to use your time the best way possible
to maximize your startups
chance for success which means you need
to be
really good at identifying and
prioritizing tasks that
are going to be the most impactful for
your startup's progress
which i've noticed after going through
thousands of weekly updates from startup
school founders
um that a lot of founders are not doing
this well so hopefully this will be
helpful
let me first pre-face all of this by
defining what time
i'm talking about so obviously there are
24 hours in a day and i'm not here
to tell you how to allocate those hours
across your startup versus everything
else that is important to you sleep
family friends hobbies and so and so
forth
um everyone has different situations so
it's hard for me to
from up here give you good generic
advice um on how
to uh allocate your time across these
things i'm just gonna assume you're
doing what's best for you
whether it's 2 6 12 hours a day that you
decide to work on your startup
it doesn't matter to me for the purpose
of this lecture i just want to help you
figure out
how to spend those 2 6 or 12 hours that
you've decided to allocate your startup
in the best possible way
all right so when it comes to things to
work on your startup
my guess is that you already have
something like a task list
in which you put new ideas on um
to eventually work on and you update
that very frequently um so let's start
from there that you have a task list of
things to do
first i want to make a real clear
distinction between real
and fake startup progress this is the
easiest way to classify whether a tasks
goes in the should do or the should not
do bucket
if it contributes to real startup
progress you should consider doing it
and if it doesn't then don't this seems
trivial at first
why would anyone do anything that
amounts to fake startup progress
but let me explain further so
real startup progress is when you're
really focused on things that
really move the needle for your startup
and in the beginning
the best way to show this is through
growth in particular growth of your
primary kpi
i gave a whole lecture on this a few
weeks ago on kpi and goals
if you haven't watched it yet please
watch it i talk a lot about primary and
secondary kpis
there's always a balance between what to
focus on but for the purpose of this
lecture i'm just going to refer to the
primary kpi
as the thing to focus on growing so to
summarize
your primary kpi almost always is either
revenue
or active users and you should always be
setting weekly goals for this to move
the needle on the kpis the highest
leverage thing you can
be doing also always comes in the form
of tasks that involve
talking to users and building and
iterating
your product nothing else this is in
direct
contrast with fake startup progress
which is when founders
focus on things that are not directly
related to growing your primary kpi
so common things i see in
weekly updates are things like attending
conferences
focusing on winning awards network
events optimizing the wrong metrics
while you may convince yourself these
are good things to focus on
they're actually many steps away from
delivering real value to your customer
and so if all the things you could be
possibly doing spending any significant
time
on any of these things is almost always
a bad idea
the goal is not to optimize startup
vanity
but actually delivering value to your
customer doing the things that will help
you directly
help you increase your kpi now that we
have one way to filter
what tasks you should be working on
let's go a little bit deeper
and figure out how to determine if
you're prioritizing the right tasks
this at first also seems trivial
presumably you're doing
what you believe is high value work i
mean nobody ever says oh let me
do the thing that is going to help my
startup the least right
uh but that's what i'm going to
challenge there are hundreds of things
you could be possibly working on to
increase your primary kpi
is what you're working on right now the
best thing you can do to meet your
weekly goal
or have you tricked yourself into doing
something else
the reason i'm skeptical is because it's
actually quite easy
easy for a low value work to
unnoticeably creep into your
schedule it actually takes a lot of work
and effort to not let this happen
so here's an experiment try journaling
in great detail
of each day in the past week every
single hour so hour by hour what is it
that you were exactly doing
and be honest on what you thought the
impact was before you actually did it
and what it was in increasing your
primary kpi
i think you'll be surprised by how much
of it it was actually low value work
and the reason is not because you're
lazy
or i hope not it's more because we tend
to be
as humans on autopilot so we don't give
much thought to what we're doing with
our time
and our natural instinct is actually to
go for low value work
because it's usually the easiest and
quickest thing to accomplish
and it fulfills our desire to check as
many things off of a list as possible
it feels really good to check things off
so
but once you're aware of this preventing
it is actually quite simple
but it does take time thought and
discipline so first if you aren't
already
you should keep a spreadsheet of ideas
that can move your primary kpi
and not to be too repetitive but these
tasks are almost always a variant of two
things right
one talking to users and two building
product
talking to users helps you with three
things right it converts them into
customers and revenue
or helps you convert them to customers
and revenue it helps you understand if
you're on the right track or not
and it helps you figure out if your
product
sorry it helps you figure out your
products roadmap and then building
product
actually delivers a solution to the user
to see if it actually translates into
more customers and revenue so as you
come up with these ideas
you should log them into your
spreadsheet and keep keep doing that as
every idea you get but the key is don't
do them right away
just write them down and this is
important because always switching to
the thing you just thought of
which always sounds better now than
later causes a ton of whiplash for
founders
and it's a primary call part in making
no progress during the week
so now you're tracking this list then
once we go through each item in your
spreadsheet and grade
the new and re-grade the old items based
on how impactful you think the task
would be
on achieving the weekly goal for your
primary kpi
there are three grades you can give to
each task on your list
high medium low these definitions are a
little arbitrary in the sense that it's
it's all
gener it's all relative to whatever else
is on your list
but in general high means it's a task
you believe that
will help you meet your goal for the
week with high probability
medium is you're not sure but with ok
probability you can hit your weekly goal
and low is with very low probability
you'll see that it's actually pretty
easy to figure out
what those low and high value tasks are
when you compare them against everything
else you could be doing
which is why this exercise no matter how
pedantic it is
is important to do so let me go through
an example
let's say i'm the founder of a of a sas
software
generic sas software company my goal for
the next week and i just kind of
launched and my goal for the next week
is just to get five
new paying customers so here's just a
sliver
of uh things i can do to reach that goal
at the top you'll see
that the most impactful thing i can do
is go to the offices of 10 potential
customers who were actually intro to me
by friends or whoever
and i know that if i show up to the
office
i have a very good chance just from my
experience i have a very good chance of
of convincing them to buy my product
um and so that's why that's at the top
of the list the next few
are of meeting impact because they
involve me filling up my pipeline
which is one step away from landing new
customers but necessary
to do i also have the second thing here
i also have a video demos i can do which
for me aren't as effective as doing in
person but worth doing as well because
they do lead to some new customers
you'll notice that there are a couple
items at the bottom
of this which involve programming so a
very common mistake
technical founders make is to build
things first and then go talk to users
and according to this list to meet my
weekly goal this means
they would be choosing the least
impactful thing to do for that week
but with this method if they're honest
about it they have no choice but to get
off their butt
and go talk to users instead
so along with the impact um that it may
have on your weekly on meeting
helping you achieve your weekly goal we
also need to consider a second dimension
of how complex the task is
that is how long would it take for you
and your team to complete it
uh because there are many tasks within
each category of impact for example
there's like four of here in medium and
three and low
and so the question is how do i stack
rank those
within that category um and so this
dimension of complexity helps
so we can create complexity in three
ways
easy medium and hard so easy an easy
task is something that you can do
in less than a day that means you can do
a bunch of easy tasks in today
a medium task is something that takes
one or two days for you to do
and a hard task is one that takes many
days to do and you may not complete it
within the week
so once you go grade all of them you'll
have
again the second dimension here where
you have impact and then also complexity
and so now you can easily stack rank all
the tasks in your list
and pretty it's pretty easy to choose
what you should prioritize
so given the objective is to hit your
weekly goal the obvious choice is always
to go
something with the uh to go for the
combos of high easy combos on high
medium that is
something attached that has high impact
and is easy to do you should always do
those first
and then go to high impact and medium
median complexity uh
and you what you really don't want to do
is focus on these bottom things here
right something that has probably very
little probability in helping
you achieve your goal and is very hard
to do it takes a long time to do there's
really no point in doing any of those
things
so just as important as selecting the
right task to work on is making sure you
don't try to do everything at once
pick enough tasks that you can complete
and do well
doing too many things means you won't be
able to complete much
with much of the task with much
conviction and makes it really hard to
show progress from week to week
how do i know i am prioritizing my time
well
ultimately you know you've done well if
you're hitting your weekly goals
consistently
so it's you're doing well if your graphs
look like that
um sadly most of us have graphs that
look like this
these trousers where it's decreasing and
you're kind of like
stable for a while at the bottom um
that's when you start doubting yourself
is like am i working really on the right
thing
um or not and so what can we do about
this or how do we know
so one way is to do what you're already
doing in startup school
which is writing weekly updates and
being really consistent and honest about
it
so the key components of weekly update
is pretty straightforward what was your
weekly goal
did you succeed if not what was the
biggest block of the growth
uh what did you do and what was the
predicted impact and what was the action
and
what was the actual impact and what it
did what did you learn this week what
were the big learnings this week
and then by doing an ongoing evaluation
of your weekly updates
it will help you improve how you select
and prioritize
tasks once in a while you should review
all your weekly updates like from
beginning the first one you ever wrote
for your startup to the current one to
the last one
and check for things like do you feel
like you're learning fast enough
are you predicting the impact of each
task well
did you let low value work or even worse
fake
progress creep into your schedule is
your biggest blocker the same thing for
every week
a lot of people actually get in a rough
spot where they're not learning anything
new
and just doing the same thing over and
over without realizing it
reviewing your updates will help you
realize that and
will force you to try to get yourself
out of that bad loop
in terms this last one in terms of
completing tasks if you're finding
yourself
always running out of time to complete
tasks you felt was totally possible
to complete in the week i have two
suggestions for you
one is perhaps your task is actually too
complex and you should break it down
into medium and easy tasks
uh the second one is maybe it is that
your schedule needs to be rejiggered a
little bit
i recommend a modified version of what
we call the makers manager schedule
which was popular popularized by paul
graham
the essay is linked in the startup
school library
the basic idea is this there are high
context switching
costs to different types of tasks for
example coding
and meetings like talking to users
meaning
it's hard to restart and ramp back up on
a task especially like coding
and it's costly to exit at a time when
things are finally flowing and you're
getting stuff done
so if you find yourself switching back
and forth too much
it may be that you're wasting time and
need to rejigger things so you have a
continuous
continuous chunk of time devoted to each
one so many
people will actually split their divide
their week in two days right so one full
day they'll just spend coding
and the next full day they'll spend
meetings and talking to users and so
forth
instead of being having like one hour
here one hour there one hour deer
for people who need to get more stuff
done in the day then they'll do
half the day they'll spend coding and
then half the day they'll
spend talking to users
uh so this is for any solo founders out
there
um this is incredibly important for you
because um you don't have the
opportunity to
divvy up the work across multiple people
um so it's really important to get your
schedule correct
all right so i'll end with one final
piece of advice
um which is moving fast so in the
beginning your startup your
primary objective is to move as quickly
as possible to prove that you're
building something
people want the faster you figure this
out
the faster you can pivot into something
or
have the confidence that you have
product market fit and can start scaling
and building a tremendous business
so making decisions thoughtfully and
quickly is super important time is often
wasted in
indecisiveness the key is to be okay
with making a wrong choice
and learning fast so of course choosing
the right thing to do
at the get-go is the best thing possible
but it's also the case that a person who
chooses the wrong task
to work on today but moves quickly
learns why it's wrong
and moves to the right one is better off
than the person that takes forever to
choose
the right tasks to work on and is
twiddling their thumbs working on low
value stuff in the meantime
that's all i have today on how to
prioritize time to summarize what you
should be doing always be working on
things that directly
impact your primary kpi do the things
that have the highest impact
to meeting your weekly goal and that
usually always means
what talking to users and building
[Applause]
[Music]
products
you
5.0 / 5 (0 votes)