How to Manage Your Time

The Startup Help Desk

In this episode we answer questions about managing your time. Startups are all about speed, so you need to make the most of every hour of every day. We are here to help! In this episode we answer questions including:

• Where should I spend my time as the CEO?
• How often should we have team meetings?
• Is our product development velocity high enough?

All of these questions were submitted by listeners just like you. You can submit questions for us to answer on our website TheStartupHelpdesk.com or on X/Twitter @thestartuphd - we'd love to hear from you!
Reminder: this is not legal advice or investment advice.
Q1: Where should I spend my time as the CEO?
As your team grows, your responsibilities will shift: less tasks as an individual contributor and more responsibilities to drive the overall company strategy. A classic breakdown of your responsibilities is 30% product, 30% money (sales, fundraising), and 30% HR.
However, if you are growing the team, hiring should be 80% of your time. Convincing great talent to join the company is hard and requires a lot of your focus.
Critical tasks that CEOs often do not spend enough time on include 1on1s, setting goals, and customer success.
In short, your responsibility is to shape the overall vision and the corresponding messaging (within the company and outside of it) and empower the talent on the team.
Q2: How often should we have team meetings?
Startups are not like big companies; you should aim for the fewest possible meetings! Consider 1 to 2 meetings a week to define priorities and assign responsibilities. Inevitably more meetings will come up – focus on doing the work, not talking about the work. Keep meetings to 20 minutes.
By keeping the volume of team meetings low, you can recognize that these are precious synchronous moments. Build a healthy routine (for example, always starting right on time, sending an agenda, or sending action items post-meeting) to maximize their output.
Q3: Is our product development velocity high enough?
If you’re not sure, then it’s likely a problem. Product development velocity should be always increasing. If it’s not, then you aren’t getting the most from your team. You need a combination of authentic urgency (i.e. pushing towards a great milestone for your customers) and a team that can motivate itself.
If velocity is not high enough, the best way to speed things up is cut down the scope of work: remove features and reduce use cases. When you are more narrow with the scope, it’s much easier to move quickly.
If you sense a deeper problem, set very clear goals on short timelines. Often people are ambitious in the goals they set for themselves and, with a short timeline, it will be easier to hold them accountable. If someone or more than 1 person isn’t working out, you may need to let them go.