Thread by @seb_g

1/ How To Schedule Your Time As A Technical Solo Founder

#startups #founders #coders #indiehackers

Here’s how:

2/ As a technical solo founder, getting the right things done in the right amount of time means your company survives instead of crashes.

3/ You want to have a good system in place to do this so that you can get your product out of the door, set up a sales system that works for your product, and a way to generate demand without making you overwhelmed and anxious.

4/ Unfortunately, and this has happened to me over several companies I've started as a solo founder, it's very easy to get caught up in fighting fires and tackling what seems to be the most pressing instead of getting the right thing done at the right time.

5/ Being a solo founder means you have to do everything and everything is waiting for you

• As a solo founder you have to make all of the decisions regarding product, sales, marketing, finance, technology, and your life

6/ • Without a sounding board it can be hard to prioritize and so people tend to work on random things rather than be thoughtful about their work

7/ • Without prioritization and a schedule (time budget), the work that gets done isn't always what needed to be done and often what gets done is the easiest not the most important

8/ • No one is checking what you are doing so it can take hours / days / weeks before you realize that you're doing things wrong

There is hope because you're the decision maker, so it means you can change how you are working right away to a new system that will help you more.

9/ Here's how, step by step:

Step 1: Budget your work time

It's important to treat your work time like a limited budget so that you have a realistic understanding of what work can get done without you feeling overworked and getting burnt out.

10/ If you are working nights and weekends for 2 hours per day, then your budget allotment for the week is 14 hours. That's it. You can't try to be a hero and work 6 hours one night to try to get things done slightly faster because you'll do worse the next day.

11/ So figure out how much time you're going to work total per week.

12/ Step 2: Rank your goals by important to the different areas of your business (product, tech, sales, marketing, etc) and what are the smallest possible wins you can get

13/ Once you have a time budget, it's tempting to start adding various parts of the project into the work time you've allotted.

14/ This won't work however because you run straight into the problem of working on things that aren't the most important thing you should be working on. What you want to do instead is to figure out first what you should be working on to drive results.

15/ Then figure out what is the smallest possible step forward that feels like a win.

You want to think to yourself, "If I accomplish nothing else but [x] this week, will I think it was a good week".

16/ Step 3: Schedule your self based on your time budget and your goals

Now that you have a time budget and tasks to complete ranked by your goals (and simple wins for each goal), open up your calendar.

17/ Start by slotting in the goals based on importance with the first things to tackle being the most important (just in case they run long) and then go down the list by the rank order.

18/ This way you will have a schedule of what and when to work and you'll be certain to accomplish the most important things related to your company. While you may not get to everything, at least you will get to important things.

19/ If you do this every week, you'll be able to reevaluate frequently and will feel less overwhelmed.

If you found this helpful, jump back to the top tweet (see below) and retweet it to help other solo founders schedule their time!

20/ Initial tweet:

https://twitter.com/seb_g/status/1511915938408509441