Time Tracking
The skill that separates our exceptional entrepreneurs from the good ones is reflection. It’s useful for knowing what you should do next and what you’ve actually done. There are a few flavors of reflection:
Reflection on first customer — does this first customer really have a bleeding-neck problem they’re already going out of their way to solve, what are the actions I’ve seen that confirm this and what are the tests I can run to learn more?
Reflection on process — am I working on the right stuff that’ll give me a chance to make the asymmetric, step-function type of gains I’ll need to be successful and am I creating a repeatable process to make this type of work easy/automatic?
Reflection on first product — is my first product actually making my first customers wildly successful in an objective, trackable, shareable way? If not, how can I narrow my customer and focus to make that true?
There are others, but those are three biggies for early-stage folks. Taking time to reflect on each ensures you’ll stay on the good path.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to reflect on process (#2). I’ve tried time tracking apps, writing down everything as I do it, etc. But, the thing that’s worked the best is a music trick.
While I’m working, I have two YouYube tabs open - The Lord of the Rings soundtrack and coffee shop jazz. They’re each a few hours long.
When I start work each day, I start each at the beginning. When I work on something that’s durable, meaning it’s something that can be used over and over or will be pushed to lots of people (working on a Zapier integration that’ll save 15 min a day every day or working on a pod that will go to thousands of people and live forever), I press play on lord of the rings. It’s fun music - kind of feels like I’m on a quest. When I stop working on that stuff, I hit stop.
Conversely, when I work on something fleeting, like an email that’ll go to one person and never help me with anything else ever again, I hit play on the coffee shop jazz. It’s boring and makes me feel kind of lame. Which is the point. I shouldn’t want to hear that - whenever I hear the coffee shop jazz I should be thinking about how I can not have to do this thing anymore.
At the end of the day, I can clearly see how long I’ve worked on fleeting tasks vs durable tasks based on how much time I’ve listened to the music on each youtube.
Silly, but really effective. Might be worth a try.