Time is precious for startup founders because it directly impacts money, which is essential for keeping a startup alive. Therefore, it's crucial to use time effectively to maximize the chances of success.

To prioritize tasks effectively, focus on identifying and working on those that will have the most significant impact on your startup's progress.

Real startup progress is defined by tasks that genuinely move the needle, such as growing your primary key performance indicator (KPI), which is typically either revenue or active users.

Fake startup progress includes activities like attending conferences or optimizing irrelevant metrics, which do not contribute directly to growing your primary KPI and can distract from delivering real value to customers.

To ensure you're prioritizing the right tasks, keep a detailed journal of your daily activities, noting the impact of each task on your primary KPI. This will help you identify low-value work that may be creeping into your schedule.

Maintain a spreadsheet of ideas that could potentially move your primary KPI, focusing on two main activities: talking to users and building your product. These tasks are essential for converting users into customers and understanding your product's roadmap.

When grading tasks, use a simple system of high, medium, and low impact based on their likelihood of helping you meet your weekly goals for your primary KPI. This helps clarify which tasks are worth pursuing. The most impactful action I can take is to visit the offices of ten potential customers who were introduced to me by friends, as I have a strong chance of convincing them to buy my product.

Meeting potential customers is crucial because it helps fill my pipeline, which is essential for landing new customers.

A common mistake technical founders make is to build products first and then talk to users, which often leads to choosing the least impactful tasks for the week.

To prioritize effectively, I need to consider both the impact of tasks and their complexity, which helps in stack ranking them.

Tasks can be categorized by complexity: easy tasks take less than a day, medium tasks take one or two days, and hard tasks may take many days and might not be completed within the week.

When prioritizing, I should focus on high-impact and easy tasks first, followed by high-impact and medium complexity tasks, while avoiding low-impact and hard tasks.

It's important to select the right tasks and not try to do everything at once; doing too many things can hinder progress and make it hard to show results week to week.

I know I'm prioritizing my time well if I'm consistently hitting my weekly goals, and I should regularly review my weekly updates to evaluate my progress and learning.

If I'm running out of time to complete tasks, I should consider breaking complex tasks into smaller ones or adjusting my schedule to allow for uninterrupted work periods.

For solo founders, it's crucial to manage time effectively since they can't delegate tasks; a modified maker's schedule can help by allocating full days to specific types of work.

In the early stages of a startup, the goal is to move quickly to validate that I'm building something people want, as this allows for faster pivots and scaling once product-market fit is achieved.

It's essential to make decisions quickly and be okay with making mistakes, as learning from wrong choices is better than being indecisive and not making progress.

To summarize, I should always work on tasks that directly impact my primary key performance indicators, focusing on high-impact activities like talking to users and building products.