Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I spend my time. I’ve tried starting earlier in the day, blocking out time on my calendar for tasks, “theming” my days, and all sorts of other hacks. In reading about different strategies, I realized I do a few things people claim are a waste of time, but that I turn into time well-spent. I thought I’d share a few of my favorite “high-leverage time-wasters.”
Reading tech news and startup advice
This is the first thing “productivity gurus” tell you to drop. ‘You’re spending all this time reading during the day,’ they say, ‘you could be spending that time creating!’
While that sentiment is generally true, I use my reading time as a way of staying on top of who’s doing/saying interesting things. First, it broadens my awareness of trends, investors, products, tactics, etc., and I use that to inform other areas of my work. Second, I use these articles as a pretense to reach out to the authors when I have something relevant to say (creating a relationship). The day I wrote this sentence (April 16), I read about a new way to do demos, growth hacking with email receipts, a Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg, the launch of Tracxn, why you shouldn’t drop out of school, and Betterment’s fundraise. Three of these generated emails/tweets with the author or topic, and I’ve started many “Internet friendships” that way. In other words, content can be about more than information consumption.
It’s easy to go overboard on this, so I try to batch my reading time and limit it to an hour daily. I read newsletters/alerts from Product Hunt, Term Sheet and Muck Rack in the morning (5-10 minutes), I plow through my Fetchnotes #read list (things I find or other people send me that I bookmark for later) during lunch (~30 minutes), and read Quibb in the late afternoon (15-20 minutes). The key is that I never have to search for content to scratch my itch, which means I rarely get sucked into the abyss of Reddit/Hacker News/Twitter.
Coffee meetings
People endlessly debate the merit of taking coffee meetings. On the one hand, there are tons of people you can either a) learn from or b) that can learn from you (both are important, the topic of another post). On the other, you’ve got industries to disrupt and “crushing it!” to do, but only 24 hours in a day. Fear not, weary networkers! I have an alternative.
In college, I came across this book by Keith Ferrazzi. To be honest, I only read the title (go ahead, judge away), but the phrase “Never Eat Alone” stuck with me. Rather than invite people to / accept coffee meetings (or bring them to my office, for that matter), I try to make everything a lunch meeting. Why?
- I have to eat, but I don’t have to get coffee. Rather than taking away time from my day, I’m just repurposing time that’s less productive anyway.
- I don’t like coffee. When I have to do a coffee meeting, I often get apple juice. It makes me feel like a 12-year-old.
- It acts as a limiting factor on how many meetings I take (there are only 5 lunches in a work week).
- Chris Howard from Libboo once gave me the advice, “Well-fed investors are happy investors.” If you’re trying to close a deal (of any sort), doing it in a neutral location with food can help make the other party more comfortable.
- If the other party is older than you (which is most people when you’re 23), they often pay for you.☺
Because I’m not really taking time away from my other responsibilities, I’m more open about what types of meetings I’ll take. This broadens my network and increases my exposure to ideas — without the sacrifice.
NOT checking email/messages in batches.
This is one of the most misleading pieces of advice I hear about productivity. The idea is that context-switching and constant notifications prevent you from focusing, and this leads to getting less done. None of this is false, and it’s great advice for people that have jobs that require hours of dedicated focus on creative work (like programming or design).
However, when you’re a startup CEO (or hold almost any other people-centric job) your responsibility is making things happen as fast as humanly possible. Unfortunately, “making things happen” usually relies more on how fast you can get other people to do things (closing sales, partnerships, financing, etc.), not how fast you can cross items on your personal to do list. By keeping my email open, I ensure I can respond immediately to anything important.
Let’s walk through an example. An investor responds to your email about getting lunch (ha! see what I did there?), but proposes a time you can’t make. If you respond immediately, chances are they’re still checking email, so when you propose an alternative, they’re a lot more likely to respond right then and there. Consequently, you get on their calendar immediately. If you “batch” email, you’re a lot more likely to miss them, and because most people suck at email, it’s not uncommon for your message to totally get lost. That means you have to follow up a few days later, pushing the meeting back a few days. All those “few days” add up and suddenly a deal that should have taken 2 months has taken 4.
The same goes for messages from your team, press, partners, etc. Absolutely shut down your communication channels when you need to focus, but making a habit of batching makes you slower at responding, and these mini-delays compound over time. You might cross more things off your individual to do list, but usually other people are the biggest bottleneck, not you.
We all need mental breaks, and we all have bad habits. But not all time-wasters need be a waste of time.