Doing Everything Today

Nothing can wait for tomorrow.<...> Or that's at least what we tell ourselves.

I know I start every week looking at Receiptful's to-do's and I have this urge to to work on everything at once (and wrap it up too).

Right now that urge is even worse, because I'm focusing on (exponentially) accelerate our growth and traction. As a result there's so many ideas and experiments that we could run, even though I know we can realistically only action a small percentage of them this week.

Ultimately we're a small team, which requires us to prioritize our tasks and to do's.

But that doesn't remove this urge or impatience to get things (read: everything) done today.

On the one hand, we have this looming deadline of running out of runway. That's a reality that most startups face and it ends in death. Simple as that.

To counter that though, I also know that we don't have to achieve all of our growth-related tasks today or this week. As long as we're making enough progress every week (given our available resources), then we should be fine.

Knowing what is enough though is hard and can only really happen in hindsight. So we're back to the start of wanting to do as much as possible (if not, everything).

Prioritising low-hanging fruit or the highest impact tasks naturally helps, because it should at least help one accomplish the things that would result in enough progress. Yet in an ideal world, it'd probably be safer to still accomplish all tasks (even if you start with the most important and work your way down the priority list).

This got me thinking about how I spend my own time and which tasks I prioritise as the founder of Receiptful and leader of my team.

And I was especially curious about how other startup founders spend their time.

Whilst I believe I'm a productive, efficient and smart contributor, I also know that most of what happens in my average week is determined by outside influences.

As the non-technical and business-focused founder, I do everything that my team doesn't do. It also means I fill the gaps, remove friction and overcome the stumbling blocks, so that my team can focus on the product. These things however are somewhat random and unexpected.

I know startups are messy at the best of times, but I don't think enough is written / said about the lives of the founders that work their way through this mess.

We only ever read the "How I doubled our conversions by doing X" or "This is how attracted A-list investors in only 7 days". This is great, but it neglects to tell of all of the failed attempts & uncertainty that happened before those founders finally cracked it.

"Hollywood has a way of making everything seem like an overnight success." - Kevin Hart

So with that said, I'd like to run an experiment and create a reference point for our ecosystem / industry by sharing exactly what I work on and do every week.

Click here to get my weekly unfiltered and unedited view of what it takes to be a startup founder. I'll include all of the tedious to do's and messy stuff that nobody on the outside (and sometimes not even my team) get to see.

I just hope this starts a conversation. :)