0

Comments

There’s a lot of bravado and war stories in the start-up world about hours worked, much of which sounds a lot like those tales our parents used to tell us about walking five miles uphill in the snow both ways to school. The team over at 37 Signals, whom I admire deeply, have lots to say about the futility of long hours for their own sake, and more recently why people with families and other commitments outside of work are fundamentally good for your team.

The difficulty, though, is for businesses that are building something new there will always be more things to do than there are hours in the day. One of my favourite time management strategies is the old staple of the urgent-important quadrant, in which if you organize everything on your plate according to its squares you’ll discover that vast amounts of activity are urgent yet not important.

I think what often gets missed when people think about time management is how we actually decide what’s important and what’s not. I’m notoriously bad at managing my own time, so to compensate my approach to work is pretty simple: focus on measuring progress according to very specific goals for the business and doing so regularly. And in turn ensuring that everything that gets done (as distinct from everything that could get done) aligns with these goals.