10 ms·

Don't. Waste. Time.

323 points by malomalo 15y ago

billpatrianakos 15y ago
Sounds like common sense but you'd be amazed by how many people don't get it! I'm working with 2 startup organizations (my own business and I'm on the board of a charity) and I've seen a ton of time wasted on meta meetings (meetings about the next meeting), and getting paperwork exactly right when it just needs to be okay, etc. Through my experience in my business I've been able to point them in the direction this article suggests. Basically, we only spend time on things that clearly get a goal achieved. The rest we just leave until we absolutely need it. There are things that need to be finished correctly right now that don't have an obvious impact on later success but those things are far fewer than one might think.
zacharycohn 15y ago
Opened up HN. Saw this headline at #1. Posted this comment. Now I'm closing HN and going back to work.
- tryitnow 15y ago
  same.
- Fliko 15y ago
  You talk about (on topic of why you need 500 karma to downvote) understanding the community and not posting contentless posts 5 posts ago and now you post this. The irony levels are off the charts!
dvdhsu 15y ago
He mentions that one shouldn't care much about business cards: I disagree. The small details, after you ship your major product, are the most important. They're what truly delight your users after the first 'wow'. I would suggest a startup to, yes, first focus on the product. Once the product is done though, they should focus on the small, "trivial", details.
- andrewflnr 15y ago
  I think he means the entire article to apply mainly to pre-product startups. He would probably agree that after that is the time to work on business cards and stuff.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    I think this is incorrect. The business card is the first deliverable of every startup, and whether or not you have a well-designed card is one of the strongest signals that your first prospective customers will use to decide whether or not you can ship what you say you are going to. Trying to save a couple hours and a couple hundred bucks by using one of the templates at Kinkos instead of working with a designer is a huge mistake. Clearly you are going to be meeting tons of people and telling them about your startup if you are really serious about it, so not having a well-designed business card from day one is just throwing away tens of thousands of dollars worth of leadgen.
    - skmurphy 15y ago
      I agree with you that business cards are a prerequisite for talking to anyone you don't already know well about your startup. "We don't have cards yet" sends a very strong negative signal.
    - mikeklaas 15y ago
      This might be good advice in some sectors I'm unfamiliar with, but I can categorically say that for 90% of startups, your advice to procure professionally-designed business cards as an early priority is simply bollocks.
    - Fliko 15y ago
      Zuckerberg didn't get his "I'm CEO bitch" business card until he was rich, so why should I? In all seriousness I'm 100% sure people care more about the product/idea of your startup more than the gold lettering on your business card. If you can prove me wrong than I'm going to get gold lettered business cards to get people to invest into my (fake) startup.
leak 15y ago
Good article. "Outsource all over the place" is so important. Pay some expert for a few hours of work that would take you a week (ie: healthcare). The one thing that I do think is important though is business cards. We got business cards before we even got 1 line of code written. It just seems like an established way to exchange info at events more so than using "bump", I think.
- dchest 15y ago
  Pay some expert for a few hours of work that would take you a week (ie: healthcare). Note that communicating with such expert sometimes can take more time and be more frustrating than if you did this yourself. It's not all black and white.
  - leak 15y ago
    Yes, I agree it's not black & white. It's just trying to find that right balance of knowing when you're time & money spent talking to an expert is far less than talking directly to reps.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    True, but one of the things an expert is expert at is knowing how to communicate with new clients and ask the right questions. The expert often knows how to communicate more effectively than a non-expert would anticipate, because she has seen all the common issues before. That's what expert means. When a non-expert encounters a problem for the first time it always feels like a uniquely strange and complicated new thing. But more often than not an expert will listen to you describe your problem for two minutes, reach into a drawer and pull out a standard design that fits 85% of your use case, adjust the settings on the five standard knobs to cover another 10% of your use case, and then focus on the remaining five per cent... or, perhaps, just deliver the solution to you and let you tinker with the remaining five per cent. It's hard to appreciate this process until you've been through it several times in different contexts. Because one of the things that non-experts are not expert at is: Knowing what the experts can do for you. Telling the difference between a problem that benefits from lavish amounts of personal attention and one that can be solved in ten minutes by someone for whom your problem is a daily routine and who knows just what to ask.
marquis 15y ago
Great tips. I've had the fortune of working with enough diverse freelancers over the years that most things that we don't have time for (design, for example), we can get done quickly and cost-efficiently. I really recommend sending small jobs out to people you can establish long-term relationships with over time, who will work with your budget. It pays off immensely.
unreal37 15y ago
Where does "blogging" and "submitting your own writing to HN" fall on the wasting time list?
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Under marketing and recruiting. Note that the submitter is a two-time cofounder with OP.
hrabago 15y ago
The key is to identify how you can best contribute, so you know whether or not you're wasting your time. If you're a small team, everyone's time might be best spent coding to deliver the product. A slightly bigger team might mean your time is best coordinating. The overhead of a "meeting" might be worth making sure everyone's aware of the design instead of creating isolated pieces of great code that doesn't work well with each other. I might be wasting time writing code when I can best contribute by taking care of 'overhead' so my team isn't blocked - there's an anecdote here somewhere of the PM who would buy coffee for the team so the team can focus on producing code - or i might be wasting time taking care of 'overhead' that doesn't matter yet (planning the optimum office layout) when I can best contribute by writing code. To know whether or not you're wasting time, you have to know what makes one work "fake" and the other "good", and my list may be vastly different from yours.
jessedhillon 15y ago
Read his link about Series F stock; in order to implement such a plan it seems that you would have to disregard his advice to just pick simple defaults when incorporating.
shivang 15y ago
Great article. The other most important thing which should be avoided in the startups is "Premature Optimization"
- mburst 15y ago
  Couldn't agree with you more. As long as the frontend works and appears fast to the end user, you'll most likely have the time to play around with the backend before you have to worry about optimizing and scaling.
lifeformed 15y ago
What I take from this is that time is more important than money; exchange money for time whenever possible. In many situations you have the option to exchange X dollars for Y hours of freed time - it's important to think about these situations in these terms, because it doesn't always look that way.
earbitscom 15y ago
There is some truth to this but doing things like paperwork quickly can lead to a lot of trouble. Read Anything You Want by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers. He recommends not worrying about having Terms and Conditions on your website, and all kinds of other "formalities". Then he says breezing through some paperwork on a loan from his father accidentally cost him, I think, $2 Million. Letting his employees handle their stock option plan resulted in a profit sharing plan that gave every dollar to the employees. When he rescinded it, they hated him moving forward.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
wmougayar 15y ago
Another useful thing: Stick to deadlines. Otherwise, there is a tendency to take as much time as time is available. Don't assume that time is infinite. Give yourself short deadlines all day long and you'll get a lot more things done.
edw519 15y ago
When it comes to efficiency/effectiveness, I prefer to focus on "Do" instead of "Don't". Richard Hamming (from "You and Your Research"): 1. What are the most important problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not? http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html Paul Graham's (from "Good and Bad Procrastination") generalization of Richard Hamming: What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you? http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html edw519's generalization of Paul Graham: Work on the most important thing until it's not the most important thing any more. I have developed this excellent/horrible habit of not being able to focus on very much of anything if there was something more important hanging over my head. Excellent in keeping me from trivial pursuits. Horrible at meal time, bed time, other people time. I'm still a work in progress.
- balsam 15y ago
  One thing I've always wanted to ask PG is: does he think that helping smart people to get rich flipping companies (usually not by doing the "coolest thing") is cooler than making a great Lisp? One answer to why not, is: "No money".
  - noahc 15y ago
    The really cool thing about money is that it makes an excellent points system. It's neat that you can trade green paper for physical things, but more importantly money is a way to keep score to two decimal places. Often times when people talk about money they are talking about resource gathering. At some point the resource gathering turns off and the money becomes an easy proxy for points. So I'm not sure that creating another Lisp is less cool, but it can't be easily measured. What if IBM uses your Lisp for everything they do, how does that compare to another guys Lisp that has 6.5 million downloads. Who is cooler?
    - balsam 15y ago
      One might define a meritocracy as one in which the coolness signalling aspect of money is no different from the resource gathering aspect. You also raise the interesting point about the granularity of money: if IBM makes more money than the Lisper for her Lisp, does that make IBM cooler? It could.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
suivix 15y ago
Why can't I learn what 42 floors is without putting in my email? Really annoying.
- skmurphy 15y ago
  Even if you do they won't tell you anything more than is on the website. Contact jaf12duke if you want details at this time (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3188969 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3188969 )
evolution 15y ago
I think lean methodology goes best with this. What matters in initial stages is working prototype, validation and then MVP. Most of the initial time is supposed to be dedicated to this than spending it with operations.
nirvana 15y ago
Here's a calculator for founder equity split: http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php (I think its faster than reading the whole QA session linked to in the original post.)
- talbina 15y ago
  Wrong post?
  - TeMPOraL 15y ago
    Good post; nirvana is referring to the link about equity splits at the beginning of the post.
jpdoctor 15y ago
Most blogs on time-management pale in comparison to The Ultimate Productivity Blog: http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/ http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/
burnstek 15y ago
Just to touch on the essence of this article for interested parties: this concept is also known by the Japanese as "Gemba" and was popularized in industry (among many other lean principles) by Toyota's production system.
blacksmythe 15y ago
>> Founder equity splits The time to do founder equity splits is before you make a product that delights customers. If you think that is something you can work out after, you don't understand human nature. Also, if you have problems working out founder equity splits, you probably have the wrong team.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
omarThanawalla 15y ago
Thank you for this article. I coincidently read this quote earlier today and I think it relates really well: "Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing" -Thomas Edison
tribeofone 15y ago
This article was a waste of my time.

323 points by malomalo 15y ago

Sounds like common sense but you'd be amazed by how many people don't get it! I'm working with 2 startup organizations (my own business and I'm on the board of a charity) and I've seen a ton of time wasted on meta meetings (meetings about the next meeting), and getting paperwork exactly right when it just needs to be okay, etc. Through my experience in my business I've been able to point them in the direction this article suggests. Basically, we only spend time on things that clearly get a goal achieved. The rest we just leave until we absolutely need it. There are things that need to be finished correctly right now that don't have an obvious impact on later success but those things are far fewer than one might think.

zacharycohn 15y ago

Opened up HN. Saw this headline at #1. Posted this comment. Now I'm closing HN and going back to work.

tryitnow 15y ago
same.
Fliko 15y ago
You talk about (on topic of why you need 500 karma to downvote) understanding the community and not posting contentless posts 5 posts ago and now you post this. The irony levels are off the charts!

dvdhsu 15y ago

He mentions that one shouldn't care much about business cards: I disagree. The small details, after you ship your major product, are the most important. They're what truly delight your users after the first 'wow'. I would suggest a startup to, yes, first focus on the product. Once the product is done though, they should focus on the small, "trivial", details.

andrewflnr 15y ago
I think he means the entire article to apply mainly to pre-product startups. He would probably agree that after that is the time to work on business cards and stuff.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  I think this is incorrect. The business card is the first deliverable of every startup, and whether or not you have a well-designed card is one of the strongest signals that your first prospective customers will use to decide whether or not you can ship what you say you are going to. Trying to save a couple hours and a couple hundred bucks by using one of the templates at Kinkos instead of working with a designer is a huge mistake. Clearly you are going to be meeting tons of people and telling them about your startup if you are really serious about it, so not having a well-designed business card from day one is just throwing away tens of thousands of dollars worth of leadgen.
  - skmurphy 15y ago
    I agree with you that business cards are a prerequisite for talking to anyone you don't already know well about your startup. "We don't have cards yet" sends a very strong negative signal.
  - mikeklaas 15y ago
    This might be good advice in some sectors I'm unfamiliar with, but I can categorically say that for 90% of startups, your advice to procure professionally-designed business cards as an early priority is simply bollocks.
  - Fliko 15y ago
    Zuckerberg didn't get his "I'm CEO bitch" business card until he was rich, so why should I? In all seriousness I'm 100% sure people care more about the product/idea of your startup more than the gold lettering on your business card. If you can prove me wrong than I'm going to get gold lettered business cards to get people to invest into my (fake) startup.

leak 15y ago

Good article. "Outsource all over the place" is so important. Pay some expert for a few hours of work that would take you a week (ie: healthcare). The one thing that I do think is important though is business cards. We got business cards before we even got 1 line of code written. It just seems like an established way to exchange info at events more so than using "bump", I think.

dchest 15y ago
Pay some expert for a few hours of work that would take you a week (ie: healthcare). Note that communicating with such expert sometimes can take more time and be more frustrating than if you did this yourself. It's not all black and white.
- leak 15y ago
  Yes, I agree it's not black & white. It's just trying to find that right balance of knowing when you're time & money spent talking to an expert is far less than talking directly to reps.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  True, but one of the things an expert is expert at is knowing how to communicate with new clients and ask the right questions. The expert often knows how to communicate more effectively than a non-expert would anticipate, because she has seen all the common issues before. That's what expert means. When a non-expert encounters a problem for the first time it always feels like a uniquely strange and complicated new thing. But more often than not an expert will listen to you describe your problem for two minutes, reach into a drawer and pull out a standard design that fits 85% of your use case, adjust the settings on the five standard knobs to cover another 10% of your use case, and then focus on the remaining five per cent... or, perhaps, just deliver the solution to you and let you tinker with the remaining five per cent. It's hard to appreciate this process until you've been through it several times in different contexts. Because one of the things that non-experts are not expert at is: Knowing what the experts can do for you. Telling the difference between a problem that benefits from lavish amounts of personal attention and one that can be solved in ten minutes by someone for whom your problem is a daily routine and who knows just what to ask.

marquis 15y ago

Great tips. I've had the fortune of working with enough diverse freelancers over the years that most things that we don't have time for (design, for example), we can get done quickly and cost-efficiently. I really recommend sending small jobs out to people you can establish long-term relationships with over time, who will work with your budget. It pays off immensely.

unreal37 15y ago

Where does "blogging" and "submitting your own writing to HN" fall on the wasting time list?

dpritchett 15y ago
Under marketing and recruiting. Note that the submitter is a two-time cofounder with OP.

hrabago 15y ago

The key is to identify how you can best contribute, so you know whether or not you're wasting your time. If you're a small team, everyone's time might be best spent coding to deliver the product. A slightly bigger team might mean your time is best coordinating. The overhead of a "meeting" might be worth making sure everyone's aware of the design instead of creating isolated pieces of great code that doesn't work well with each other. I might be wasting time writing code when I can best contribute by taking care of 'overhead' so my team isn't blocked - there's an anecdote here somewhere of the PM who would buy coffee for the team so the team can focus on producing code - or i might be wasting time taking care of 'overhead' that doesn't matter yet (planning the optimum office layout) when I can best contribute by writing code. To know whether or not you're wasting time, you have to know what makes one work "fake" and the other "good", and my list may be vastly different from yours.

jessedhillon 15y ago

Read his link about Series F stock; in order to implement such a plan it seems that you would have to disregard his advice to just pick simple defaults when incorporating.

shivang 15y ago

Great article. The other most important thing which should be avoided in the startups is "Premature Optimization"

mburst 15y ago
Couldn't agree with you more. As long as the frontend works and appears fast to the end user, you'll most likely have the time to play around with the backend before you have to worry about optimizing and scaling.

lifeformed 15y ago

What I take from this is that time is more important than money; exchange money for time whenever possible. In many situations you have the option to exchange X dollars for Y hours of freed time - it's important to think about these situations in these terms, because it doesn't always look that way.

earbitscom 15y ago

There is some truth to this but doing things like paperwork quickly can lead to a lot of trouble. Read Anything You Want by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers. He recommends not worrying about having Terms and Conditions on your website, and all kinds of other "formalities". Then he says breezing through some paperwork on a loan from his father accidentally cost him, I think, $2 Million. Letting his employees handle their stock option plan resulted in a profit sharing plan that gave every dollar to the employees. When he rescinded it, they hated him moving forward.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

wmougayar 15y ago

Another useful thing: Stick to deadlines. Otherwise, there is a tendency to take as much time as time is available. Don't assume that time is infinite. Give yourself short deadlines all day long and you'll get a lot more things done.

edw519 15y ago

When it comes to efficiency/effectiveness, I prefer to focus on "Do" instead of "Don't". Richard Hamming (from "You and Your Research"): 1. What are the most important problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not? http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html Paul Graham's (from "Good and Bad Procrastination") generalization of Richard Hamming: What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you? http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html edw519's generalization of Paul Graham: Work on the most important thing until it's not the most important thing any more. I have developed this excellent/horrible habit of not being able to focus on very much of anything if there was something more important hanging over my head. Excellent in keeping me from trivial pursuits. Horrible at meal time, bed time, other people time. I'm still a work in progress.

balsam 15y ago
One thing I've always wanted to ask PG is: does he think that helping smart people to get rich flipping companies (usually not by doing the "coolest thing") is cooler than making a great Lisp? One answer to why not, is: "No money".
- noahc 15y ago
  The really cool thing about money is that it makes an excellent points system. It's neat that you can trade green paper for physical things, but more importantly money is a way to keep score to two decimal places. Often times when people talk about money they are talking about resource gathering. At some point the resource gathering turns off and the money becomes an easy proxy for points. So I'm not sure that creating another Lisp is less cool, but it can't be easily measured. What if IBM uses your Lisp for everything they do, how does that compare to another guys Lisp that has 6.5 million downloads. Who is cooler?
  - balsam 15y ago
    One might define a meritocracy as one in which the coolness signalling aspect of money is no different from the resource gathering aspect. You also raise the interesting point about the granularity of money: if IBM makes more money than the Lisper for her Lisp, does that make IBM cooler? It could.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

suivix 15y ago

Why can't I learn what 42 floors is without putting in my email? Really annoying.

skmurphy 15y ago
Even if you do they won't tell you anything more than is on the website. Contact jaf12duke if you want details at this time (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3188969 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3188969 )

evolution 15y ago

I think lean methodology goes best with this. What matters in initial stages is working prototype, validation and then MVP. Most of the initial time is supposed to be dedicated to this than spending it with operations.

nirvana 15y ago

Here's a calculator for founder equity split: http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php (I think its faster than reading the whole QA session linked to in the original post.)

talbina 15y ago
Wrong post?
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  Good post; nirvana is referring to the link about equity splits at the beginning of the post.

jpdoctor 15y ago

Most blogs on time-management pale in comparison to The Ultimate Productivity Blog: http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/ http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/

burnstek 15y ago

Just to touch on the essence of this article for interested parties: this concept is also known by the Japanese as "Gemba" and was popularized in industry (among many other lean principles) by Toyota's production system.

blacksmythe 15y ago

>> Founder equity splits The time to do founder equity splits is before you make a product that delights customers. If you think that is something you can work out after, you don't understand human nature. Also, if you have problems working out founder equity splits, you probably have the wrong team.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

omarThanawalla 15y ago

Thank you for this article. I coincidently read this quote earlier today and I think it relates really well: "Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing" -Thomas Edison

tribeofone 15y ago

This article was a waste of my time.