The Dimension You Cannot Change

Building a startup is one giant multidimensional puzzle, but time is the one immutable dimension you cannot adjust. You can use time to your advantage in your startup, but you never lose sight of your personal need to manage your own precious time.

One of a startup’s most significant advantages is often the speed and agility the springs from green fielding a novel solution. Moving fast is the way to keep ahead of developing competition and hitting an emerging market need, and it is a way to build and capture market value.

But the one dimension you cannot change in your quest to go fast is time. You can’t get more of it or make it go faster. It is your most precious resource because it does not bend to your will. Since you cannot adjust time, you need to manage everything else that you can change to optimize your startup’s use of time. As I outlined in my project management post, you get to decide what deadlines are achievable and desirable for your startup. You can apply resources like outsourcing, hiring, and expediting to make achieving those milestones possible. Similarly, you can adjust the scope and complexity of what you are trying to get done in a particular timeframe. All of these tactics are possible in the context of an organization.

However, as an individual, your allotment of time is fixed. Since your time does not scale, it becomes your limiting resource and makes choosing how you use it of paramount importance. Since you only have a fixed number of minutes to spend, you need to be intentional about spending your available minutes to have the highest possible positive impact on your startup’s progress. I like to continually challenge myself:

• “Is this my highest, best use at this moment?”
• “Is this something that only I can take care of?”
• “Is this a worthy use of my (endlessly limited) time resource?”

Hopefully, my answers to these questions of how I allocate my personal time reflect my considered perception of what the priorities are for solving the next set of significant problems facing my startup and me. Often, I end up focusing on making strategic investments in building my startup’s capacity by developing my team members’ skills or doing things like fundraising that only I can spearhead. I also find that I invest my time in longer-range planning to ensure that we have a set of well-defined and interlocking strategies to accomplish our goals and be a barrier buster and enabler for my team to make sure they are not stuck. These are all highly leverageable uses of my time that power our startup forward.

I am also acutely aware that each of my team members is similarly constrained in that they only have a fixed amount of time they can use to accomplish their work. Some of the best things I can do to enable their optimal use of time are being crisp and clear on the goals and objectives I am asking them to accomplish and always seeking to ensure that they have the resources they need when they need them to get the job done. As a leader and manager, I help my team work efficiently by helping them avoid spinning due to lack of clarity or important context, taking advantage of my often broader perspective to connect people and projects at critical points, and sometimes generating an initial draft or outline to help establish some messaging.

For each and every one of us, time is precious, and what we invest in should be worthy of this limited resource. Applied well, we can use our time to build tremendous value together.