Frameworks (1/n): Time

The first post in a series of frameworks that have helped me in entrepreneurship and life.

Entrepreneurship constantly challenges you and your team.

These challenges include:

• Fires that must be put out now (a customer is angry and threatening you)

• Slow blazes that are not right-now but will be impactful before too long (making payroll in a week when you just lost that customer)

• Wildfires that are way off into the future (a fundraising round you’re launching in 3 months, or hitting your growth targets to be financially positioned for your next round in 18 months).

It’s chaotic. Your job as an entrepreneur and leader is to organize and direct the chaos. This daily reality is what you signed up for when you entered the arena.

Nothing will ever be fully organized - in fact, if they are, that surely indicates that you’ve been focused on the wrong things while your competition is getting ahead.

As a lifelong entrepreneur and person with ADHD, I’ve invested tremendous time and effort to figure out my own system of managing the internal and external chaos. This series is about frameworks that have worked for me and can help you in the arena.

Time Horizons

I don’t like to think about managing time. I instead fundamentally think in terms of managing my output per unit time. I can’t control time, but I can control how I approach my productivity per half-hour, hour, and so on.

Why? Human beings evolved to survive in hunter-gatherer and then agrarian societies. We didn’t exist to be always-on automatons, and we need rest (read: my popular article on sleep). This means that we can’t just assume that we will be steady throughout the day. We need to think about managing our output per unit time as our capacity fluctuates in accordance with:

• circadian rhythm

• ultradian rhythm

• light exposure

• hydration

• nutrition

• sleep

• mental load and cognitive taxation

• changing nature of tasks

• general energy levels

With this perspective, it’s helpful to think about time not strictly as the present moment, but more so along the lines of what choices got you to the present moment, and what you will do to set yourself up for future present moments.

If that sounds woo-woo, that’s because it probably is. Nevertheless, stay with me here.

Simply put, the life you’re living today is the result of work you did days, weeks, and years ago. In the present moment, you are simply faced with the consequences of decisions you made in the past. The reverse is also true–what you do now sets you up for present moments in the future. This dynamic can work for you or against you.

Your goal as a founder is to use the present moment to deal with those consequences now, while setting yourself up for better present moments in the future. Extend the time horizons you can think through by making progressively better decisions.

Okay, but what does that mean, practically speaking?

If you can only through the day-to-day because life is too stressful and you’re too overwhelmed with demands, then first DO LESS BUT BETTER. Decide on what’s most important and then delay, delegate, or delete the rest. Do what’s most important and with 80/20 standards for success, so you set yourself up to think about the next day today. Then, you can think through to three days from today, then eventually a week. You will constantly be responding to what you set yourself up for in longer and longer time horizons.

Here’s what I use to tackle near-term items:

• Checklists

• Written daily agendas

• Google Calendar

• Block and tackle systems

• A workingmemory.txt file where I offload Not-Now items

• Breaking actions down until any ambiguity is removed through step-by-step directions that anyone could follow.

• Countdown timers and stopwatches

• Reverse engineering steps from the desired outcome

• Visualize a moment at the end of a successful day

From there, my mantra is:

Stay proactive so you don’t have to be reactive.

Here’s what I use to proactively turn longer-term wildfires into more actionable, near-term steps:

• Reverse calendar. (If you already know know what a GANTT chart is, feel free to skip) First, schedule any long-term deadlines into your Google Calendar. Break it down into quarterly goals (ie, schedule one checkpoint each Friday for a deadline four Fridays from now). From that overly simplified standpoint, start thinking critically about dependencies and what sections might take more time or energy, and schedule those in.

• Schedule Send emails for future dates in case people don’t get back to you. This keeps conversations moving and prevents delays from happening.

• Schedule days and times to batch together research for events, people to reach out to, programs to apply for, and so on. As your current commitments wind down, schedule times toward the end to start applying to the next thing. If you successfully execute this routine, thinking one cycle ahead becomes two, three, and four cycles ahead.

The world’s best entrepreneurs can take bigger risks with greater financial upside is because they’ve done the work to buffer themselves from near-term disruptions - that’s the deeper reality that you don’t see behind the headlines and dollar signs. That’s what lets them think as futurists five, ten, and twenty years ahead while everyone is catching up. It is hard to overstate the value of the compounding effect at work here.

Once you get to a certain point, you can start thinking in terms of other people’s time. This means managing other people who report to you, but also managing investments in other businesses.

Generational wealth works the same way - it’s the potential energy and time created by successful past bets that created longer and longer time horizons.

Now, it’s time to turn knowledge into action. Go do epic things.