Move faster

Reframing productivity in startups

Hi all —

I get the same question from every founder: “Do you think we’re moving fast enough?”

If you ask this question, you know the answer: Hell no.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about productivity. What got us to $4M ARR in two years, after two years of meaningless wandering? And what’s taken Reframe from $0 to $500k ARR in 6 months?

What’s the common thread among the best-performing startups I’ve seen?

It’s not intelligence, hard work, or mental toughness (though all are needed).

The common thread: Speed, driven by a different way to think about productivity.

Productivity =/= Crushing Tasks

Here’s the typical way founders & employees think about productivity: I had a 100-item-long to-do list, and I crushed every single thing.

This feels productive. It feels like things are moving forward. When everyone’s loaded up with tasks, it seems like progress is being made.

Just about every team thinks this way. Whether you use OKRs or not, whether you do scrum-style sprints or not, you approach productivity one way: “How do we make sure everyone’s time is optimized to do the most things?”

This makes intuitive sense. But it’s wrong.

Here’s why:

The metric that matters is not “employee utilization rate.”

It is “speed of getting the #1 most important thing done.”

Read that again. It’s really important.

When everyone is fully utilized, one of two terrible things happens:

• The company’s “most important thing” gets bottlenecked, because everyone is fully utilized (to get “the most important thing” done, everyone has to reprioritize what they’re currently doing)

• Or, worse & more frequently, the company’s “most important thing” never gets discussed because everyone is fully loaded with less important tasks, you don’t feel like you have enough time or bandwidth to effectively focus

As a result, you wind up with a bunch of stressed employees who are doing a lot of things, but the business isn’t moving as fast as it could.

And you think, “damn, do we need to hire more? We’re at capacity and people are burning out.”

Which leads to more people, all fully utilized, as the startup crawls to its painful death.

Productivity = Get the Most Important Thing Done NOW

I am rewiring my mind to be “ok” with downtime. To be ok with only accomplishing one thing per day - instead of a mountain of tasks - if my “one thing” is the most important one.

This is how I’m building multiple businesses without going crazy.

Three things you need to do in order to move faster and be truly productive:

1. Figure out what is most important today

2. Figure out the fastest way to get it done

3. Deprioritize / ignore everything else until it’s done, then repeat

It’s simple, but not easy to implement. Because they break the productivity antipattern I’ve seen in every startup & company:

1. Write a list of to-dos, without seriously grappling with what’s most important today

2. Do them all, without shaping the fastest way to get them done

3. Burn out

Thoughts?

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PS - great, more detailed & technical version of this HERE