Be Productive. Not Busy.

When asking any startup, “How are things going?” The response will always be, busy. But why? What specifically makes them feel busy?

Staying busy is an excuse. However, the question itself is loaded. If a startup is anything but busy, are they being effective? Every day rather than staying busy, ask yourself what am I going to do today? What is the one thing I need to accomplish in order to make some type of traction?

This could be business or product traction. Hopefully it’s a little of each.

Don’t Just Show Up

When working for a large organization people show up to work. Showing up to work is as effective as anything else. To large organizations, just being there demonstrates productivity. Moving from a large company to a startup can spin people’s heads. Rather than showing up, they need to be productive and accomplish tasks from day one.

If you are deciding to join a startup, keep this in mind. Just showing up, isn’t good enough. Commuting and then being somewhere isn’t an effective use of your time. 37Signals touches on this point when they ask people, “Where do you get work done?” Overwhelmingly the answer isn’t at work. So, showing up to work doesn’t equate to productivity. What matters is what you do while you’re there.

Don’t Do Anything Else

To be effective, remove all things except the single task you need to accomplish. When you were at work yesterday, which of the following did you do?

• Did you check your personal email?
• Did you go to Facebook?
• Did you chat with someone on IM?
• Did you do anything else to procrastinate?
• How much time did you actually spend on accomplishing your goal?

It is human nature to procrastinate. When you feel the urge to put something off, stop, refocus, and accomplish it as fast as possible.

Large Organization Mentality

People often state how large organizational changes are like turning an aircraft carrier. Large organizations are slow to change. The advantage of being at a startup is how fast you can move from one thing to another.

People in large organizations need to protect themselves. If they make a poor decision, they could lose their job. This isn’t different at a startup. If you choose the wrong path your company can fail. If you are monitoring and testing the things you are working on this won’t happen. This is why company culture is such an important factor of a startup. Create an environment of failure is okay as long as there are reasons why you are abandoning an idea.

Good Enough is 80% effective

In order to be more effective, you need to accomplish more. You need to focus your time on energies on lots of things, a never ending stream of to-do’s. You can’t create more hours in a day. But, you can open up more time by not focusing on perfection.

Nothing sucks more time then attempting to create something perfect. Whatever you are working on right now doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be good enough. When you complete the first draft of whatever you are working on, ask yourself, “is this good enough?”

Is this code, good enough to push to production? Is this design good enough to be effective? Is this text good enough for people to understand? 80% of the time your first draft is good enough. Push it. You can always come back to it if problems arise.

Doing these simple things will help free up more of your time to work on more things. It seems counter-intuitive, but working on more things and “publishing” them will make you be more productive.

Stay productive.