Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Routan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com, Will Schroeder. Will, of all the things founders tell us they wish they had, more money would probably be at the top of the list, but is a very, very close second. More time is one of those things that everybody seems to yearn for. I want to open this a little story, a little fun. You sort of test floated this episode by making a little, a little Reddit post, and you've raised some hackles on Reddit, which, like, to be fair, isn't isn't hard to do, but even on Reddit, I feel like this this was pretty extreme. Can you walk us through what your little, stop wasting your time, you have more time than you think uh post did on Reddit.

Wil Schroter: The the title of my post, which to be fair, was intentionally like incendiary. My wife said the other day she, cause I, I posted this post, and the title was something that fact why I give my team as few hours as possible to get things done. Yes. Now, and my wife was like, you knew what you were signing up for, right? Like you couldn't have been surprised by the answer, so I posted it in the startup subreddit, and basically what I explained this is the the genesis of this episode, so I think, you know, folks are gonna appreciate what this response. Here's what I actually said. I said I, I, I went through an experiment to find out what's the least amount of time we need to get something done, and then just started optimizing around getting things done faster with a compressed timeline. And in that post, the post was about compressing time and getting more time out of your day. But in that post I made one line that said engineering is notorious for this problem, meaning, you know, things expanding, but I said, but they certainly don't have a monopoly on it. In that line alone is somehow what everybody just instantly jumped on and they were like, you know, nothing about software engineering. You can't compress timelines like that. You're gonna create technical data. I mean, when batshit crazy.

Ryan Rutan: Tell me you don't know how to code without telling me you don't know how to write

Wil Schroter: softwares that was, yeah, yeah, and I was just like. What the hell are you talking about? Nothing to do with what I was talking about.

Ryan Rutan: You're ranting about something that I didn't raise, I think you're, you're shouting off into the void at this point.

Wil Schroter: I made the second mistake that you never do in Reddit, which is fight back, and I'm not like a fight back kind of I don't have a dog. I don't really care.

Ryan Rutan: The only way to survive on Reddit is if you make a mistake, you have to immediately possum, you just. Have to like roll over belly up and just like try to breathe as shallowly as possible. It's the only way to come out alive.

Wil Schroter: People started making just these lame comments, right, which which everybody does on Reddit, like whatever. And I made the mistake of saying this comment has no value, write something that's productive, right? Because everyone like they believe that the coolest thing to do is make a snarky, really zero value comment, and and that was like, tell me you don't know software engineering without telling me you don't, you don't know software engineering. I wrote back that comment has no value. And people went nuts. Now nuts.

Ryan Rutan: Well, because, because for a lot of Redditors, your comment has no value equals you have no

Wil Schroter: have no value, right? And but

Ryan Rutan: oh my God, yeah, I, you, you are a worthless human being.

Wil Schroter: So, to be fair, whenever we post on Reddit, and I, I post occasionally just from different thoughts, some they either go amazingly well. I think I have like one of the top 5 posts on Reddit of all time, or like this one, where I just got downvoted but

Ryan Rutan: they fire and ice on on Reddit. There's nothing in between.

Wil Schroter: So, the point is, this was a topic that was awfully contentious. Yeah, for an awful lot of people, for entirely the wrong reasons. It was so misunderstood. What I was trying to say, what I did say, I wasn't trying to say, this is what I did say. What I did say was this, bounders, you have all the time in the world that you need, you're just not using it properly. And and that's true, and I pointed to myself as the prime candidate of that issue, and to be useful, I actually talked about what I did to solve it, which is what we're gonna talk through today. And all people good enough for Reddit, pal. Yeah, engineers are bad, right? And so anyway, let's talk about let's let's talk about kind of what we're gonna try to to discover here. The the idea is we all have the same amount of hours in the day, and we're all complaining that we don't have enough time, especially for like solo founders, etc. like I have so many things to do and I don't have the time. And my answer is always, are you sure? Yeah, of course I'm sure, you know, things aren't getting done. I'm, I'm not saying that. I, I get that they're not getting done. Are you sure? That your time is fully optimized, and if so, how do you know? I'll initially get a lot of pushback, but I'll say, look, this is how I know. I went through, this is years ago, Ryan, you and I have talked about this before. Years ago I went through and I did a very comprehensive, but not hard to do synopsis. I just did a time log of my time in 15 minute increments for 2 weeks straight. I just kept an Excel doc at the time and just you'd write wrote everything I did in 15 minutes. That part wasn't hard. It was when I went back and analyzed it, and I was like, wow, do I waste a lot of time.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, why was I doing that? Why this is

Wil Schroter: me working nonstop, right? Like this is me at my peak of work, right? So this isn't me being like lazy and I'm screwing around on social media at the time anything social media existed yet. I'm doing nothing but work. But when I unpacked exactly how much work I was getting done, it was hilariously small relative to the amount of hours I was putting in. And Ryan, I think I think you've gone through this exercise too.

Ryan Rutan: We did, we did, we charted this at the same time and and I remember there were some other super interesting findings. I don't want to dig into those today, but around because this is more about like the true optimization with In that time, um, as opposed to just like the elimination, but where we figured out things like there are different parts of the day where we're better at specific types of work, like there's golden hours of creativity, and that there were different times of the day for for the the two of us. Yeah, that it's it's such an amazing exercise and one that we, we put our teams through on, on a fairly regular basis. But yeah, the reality is, man, we don't need more hours. Right? We don't need a bigger bucket of time. We need to plug some of the leaks in that bucket, right? Cause there is no more time, right? We all get the same 24 hours, right, figuring out where you're throwing it to the wind is is the core exercise here. But

Wil Schroter: let's stick with that for a second because I, I, I want to unpack what was happening to my time. You see a leaky bucket, right? It was in places you wouldn't think about. Now, this is back right before I had kids, right? And so I had unlimited time as far as being, you know, unencumbered to family, so to speak, right? That that changed dramatically, and we'll talk about that.

Ryan Rutan: Your time was fully, fully in your hands at your discretion on how to spend it, right?

Wil Schroter: This was my schedule, and I'm using this just so you can understand the benchmark I was working against. My schedule was, I go to work every day while it's still dark outside, which is ironic cause I still do that now just differently. Well, it's still dark outside, uh, and I come home usually around midnight ish, every day of the week, and on weekends, more or less the same, some version of the same. And I was perfectly fine with that. I had no complaints about it. For what now that I'm looking back, that would have been 18 years straight, OK? So, if you think about the sheer number of allocated hours I had to work, it was all of them. And so my, my point there is, I looked at that going, I couldn't possibly have more output because I couldn't possibly have more input. That was the mistake I made. I actually thought that working all of those hours was what was getting me those those results in in those outcomes. I was pretty happy with the outcomes. Yeah. What I didn't understand, what I would come to learn was that was a massive amount of wasted effort.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's, it's kind of like thinking about like driving somewhere in a V8 versus driving somewhere in a two stroke engine, right? You can get to the same place on a lot less fuel if you optimize,

Wil Schroter: right? So, let's talk about what happens when I look at these time sheets, so to speak, and and I unpack this, right? What I found was that a lot of the things I was doing, the amount of time things took, everything from meetings to projects, you name it, had a lot to do with how I allocated too much time to them. Yeah, that was the first cardinal sin that I, I did not get. Do you remember when meetings always used to be an hour, like no matter what

Ryan Rutan: because that's the size of the block on the calendar, like of course that's gonna be, right? It's too hard to drag it to hit just that 15 minute block.

Wil Schroter: I haven't attended an hour long meeting in a decade, maybe longer, uh, just to give you,

Ryan Rutan: yeah, I'm not sure I attend an hour worth of meetings. Uh, you know, in a week at this point, not if I can help it, right? Meetings are what happens when work isn't.

Wil Schroter: Exactly. Meetings were number one biggest thing and back in the day, I mean, I'm saying back in the day for us cause we've kind of moved past this, but back in the day, meetings were a big part of your day, right? It was like, I'm in meetings, I, you know, business meetings, meetings, business, right? And so I looked at that and then I started to think, and this is so silly looking back at this. I was like, How is it that everyone else seemed to agree that every problem required an hour to solve? And

Ryan Rutan: that is the standard problem solving time frame, Will, like that's it's scientifically proven.

Wil Schroter: And do you remember how it used to be bad etiquette if if the meeting ended earlier or or if you left the meeting early, it was like, whoa, whoa, hold on, we still have 8 minutes to go, right? Yeah, so meeting blow was definitely way up there, OK. The second big category for me. Was bullshit conversations. Now this one gets a lot of pushback. Bullshit conversations is what happens on Slack all day now, OK? I know the water cooler just moved to Slack. But bullshit conversations are just, I'm talking about stuff, and there's nothing wrong with talking about stuff. We're not robots, but it's not getting anything done, right? Like we're chatting, we're yucking it up, but like we also aren't getting anything done. So no matter how long we do this, our work is just gonna keep not getting done. That doesn't mean stop doing it. It means understand the cost, you know what I mean?

Ryan Rutan: Man, I remember this one so clearly, when we moved to that the open office framework, right, when we, we tore. Down the glass offices and like we just had a big open floor. I didn't realize what happened at that point. I, I felt it after. I felt it when we started doing more remote and then when I went fully remote, and, and here's what happened as an empath introvert who extroverts when he has to. I didn't even have to be pulled into bullshit conversations, Will. I just overhear them, and all of a sudden they're internalized and they become my problems. I'm now spending time worrying about thinking about all these other people's problems, so the emotional drain that that had on me was insane and it killed time, right? I didn't have to be here. that, but I was, and I can't ignore it because that's who I am. And so like I realized that after we moved to, well, when I moved fully remote, when when we moved from Columbus to Florida, I felt it all I was like, what is going on here? Where is this extra time and energy coming from? And I was like, Ah, it's all that time and energy that was getting eaten up just through osmosis. Like I didn't even have to actually be in the conversation.

Wil Schroter: That's what I'm saying. It's slack all day long. The problem with slack is that you lose your hours by the second, right? You lose your hours like every one of those extra chats, every one of those extra threads or whatever.

Ryan Rutan: 1 1000 cuts, you don't feel it.

Wil Schroter: You don't even that I'm saying the boiled frog thing, right? Let me give you a perfect example of where it used to happen. Now again, just moved to to slack. It used to happen in email. The the dreaded email chain, OK. Oh man. So a problem comes up, again, I'm going back 15 years or whenever I did this, this thing, but, but I found it in my email chains, in my threads. So problem comes up, somebody posts to 5 people, you know, they're doing what they're supposed to do, they're not doing anything wrong, but they post to, you know, 5 people in the chain. Now you've just interrupted 5 different people, but that's a that's a whole other thing, right? Now within that chain, people are going back and and there's some sequence to it, again, it just happens in a in a slack check now, but this wild thing happened. I went on a vacation, um, it was actually during my, um, uh, my honeymoon, and I didn't respond to emails, which was like a very unusual thing for me, so I just didn't have another way to like test this theory. And I remember coming back and catching up on my emails, which like a a rational person, that's what that's what they do.

Ryan Rutan: There's nothing worse than reading a now gone cold email thread.

Wil Schroter: That's exactly it, man. That's

Ryan Rutan: it it's one of Dante's circles of hell,

Wil Schroter: for sure. I remember talking to Sarah, my wife, and I was like, babe, there's like 14 things that happened just yesterday. That I would have spent the entire day getting wrapped in, that clearly I wasn't even needed for. OK, this goes back to, you know, what is Slack now. Slack's even worse because the cost to engaging people is so low that the frequency goes up dramatically. But if you could audit that, if you could audit that time spent and say how many of those chats, engagements, whatever, required all of us, and required my input, it's typically a very small amount. Now, we're pointing out all of these things, not to say that they're bad, it's not about where our time goes, right? If you were to rank every activity that you had during the day and say which ones had the most direct impact on getting shit done. I think you would be shocked and terrified at how few things you did, not you just you being all of us, that you did yesterday, that actually drove the meter and how much absolute bullshit you did. Now imagine we've got an organization that doesn't try to stamp out any of this, right? Like, no one's like, hey, this meeting only needs to be 4 minutes, like like, here's a good example, right. In our leadership meetings now, when we get together. Before the meeting in our leadership chat, you've got a slack chat for leadership. I always say, hey, we actually don't need to have the meeting this week. Back in the day, if you didn't have the leadership meeting, like what does this mean? Like does it mean everything's falling apart? And I was like, because we're all up to speed. Like we just literally don't need the speed.

Ryan Rutan: Do, we all know what the other is doing, and we all know where we intersect, and let's just go and do that. Let's get to the intersection rather than talk about getting to the intersection. And

Wil Schroter: we'll say, does anybody have something they need to cover, and of course they have the space to that that they they want to do in the meeting. In almost every case, it's no. Think of, we just saved everybody's time, everybody's time that's in that uh meeting, right? And I don't think people have that sense of how costly time management is.

Ryan Rutan: It's a bit like saving money. Right, it compounds big time, right? It compounds big time. The goal isn't to create more time, it's it's to stop wasting it in in the same way like when we stop wasting time. And we started saving that time, we can compound that into so many other things, and think about the fact like we're talking about the founders right now, but it permeates the entire organization.

Wil Schroter: People suck at time management. The problem is they don't believe it.

Ryan Rutan: It's it's the first thing I'd say like every founder mismanages well before they're even given the opportunity to mismanage money or team or anything else. They mismanage time, right? It is, and then it becomes pervasive in the organization because it's just how it goes. Right, I mean, I it's funny though, I was thinking about that. One of the reasons for the hour long meetings in the beginning, I think, for me, was it was like it was so lonely before there was any team that once there was team, I just wanted excuses to hang out with people and so meetings were the way to do that. It was just an excuse to to just to have people around just like my little comfort blanket.

Wil Schroter: This interesting thing happens around the time that I'm I'm doing this experiment. My daughter arrives that next miracle of birth. That is miracle of birth, yeah, it is interesting. And uh so my father for the first time you and I had kids around the same time, and one day I'm at work, this is right after summer, my daughter was born, and my wife calls me and she's like, hey, what time are you coming home? And I was like, what are you talking about? right? it's only 6 o'clock. She's like, yeah, we're gonna have dinner. And I was like, like this is first dinner, right? 6 o'clock is first dinner. Is there,

Ryan Rutan: is there a new 3 or 4 hour daylight savings time I didn't know about what

Wil Schroter: talking about is it? I say this with Jess now because it's it's goofy, but back then it wasn't like it didn't even occur to me. And and I know when people like, I'm such a time machine, right? When people hear about this stuff now, they're like, what a psychopath. You gotta understand it wasn't that unusual.

Ryan Rutan: It wasn't. No, that's the thing, like we, it sounds unreasonable now. Wasn't necessarily unreasonable then, but you also have to remember that founders are not the most reasonable people.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, right, it's all I've done so that

Ryan Rutan: compounded that wasn't that far out of line. It wasn't like if you had told me that, like if you saider just called and said, uh, when are you gonna be home for dinner? I'd be like, already like why?

Wil Schroter: I remember every night I used to have Jimmy Johns deliver my my second dinner at 9 p.m. to the office, and I remember uh ironically, his name was Will, who was our deliverer. I mean, I, he's there every day, so I got to know him, and we ended up hiring him in in customer support, and he ended up becoming the head of customer. It's awesome. But anyway, my point is, uh, wife calls me up, what time do you come home for dinner? And I thought it was like a trick question now, it was like midnight, I guess, and she's like, no, we're gonna start having a family dinner at 6 o'clock, and I'm like, damn. Now, first off, let's rewind back and say, Well, how did it not occur to you that you were gonna have to come home to your family for dinner? It did not occur to me, OK? And in that moment I was like, damn,

Ryan Rutan: but I already scheduled a stand up with her this week. Yeah,

Wil Schroter: exactly. I like, I was like, I'm about to lose 6 hours of my day, right? But this was so important. This was such a critical moment that just, you know, forced what we call in our family a happy accident, like, you know, when, when something happens and you're like, oh, you know, worked out great, that's a happy accident. Here's what happened. The next day I came into work. I was like, shit, I've got to get everything I need to get done by 6 o'clock. That's impossible. And it turns out it is not.

Ryan Rutan: The miracle of birth was followed by another miracle. The miracle of time compression.

Wil Schroter: The miracle of time compression, the power of constraints. We always talk about how long things take to get done, and my answer is always by what measure? Right? And so a lot of people will say, well, I think it'll take 5 hours to get this done. I was like, if you had 50 hours, could you get it done? Like, yeah, of course, I can get it done in 5. If you had 2, could you get it done? Oh, I couldn't possibly get it done in 2. Have you tried? And that's, that's where this started to come in. I started to become obsessed with the idea of time compression. You know, how quickly can I get something done? Now, the cynics here are instantly gonna say, we're just gonna burn yourself out cause you're gonna be trying to get everything done so quickly. Ah, that's that's where you are wrong, cynic person, Allah read it. Um, I wanna get something done faster and more efficiently, so I have more time, so I have more time. And so I started to apply these constraints on everything that I was doing, right? I was like, I've got to write a newsletter article. I normally give myself all day to do it, and to give myself 2 hours. And this magical thing happens when you start to apply constraints. It just takes 2 hours to get something done.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, when the clock shrinks, focus sharpens. Like we see this in a lot of other places, like, think about how much happens in like the last 30 seconds of a close basketball game. All the timeouts, all the play calling, all this stuff, because we have to create, we have to create something in a really we had all that other time, and we played the up until now, but it's gonna be decided based on this intense and tiny amount of of time that we have left. And what happens? An intense amount of focus comes because that's all we have left, and we know that's all we have left. When we don't have that constraint, if basketball games just kept going until one of the teams gave up, they'd be a hell of a lot longer, but we'd still just have one winner and one loser, right? no outcome change. But a lot more time spent.

Wil Schroter: And so I started to realize, and all the things that we're doing, you know, my own work and the company's work, whatever, the more time we gave ourselves, the more of a disadvantage we created. I had come to believe that I had the entire day, I had 6 a.m. to midnight every day to get work done. So, not surprisingly, all my work took exactly that long, but all of a sudden I cut that down. Into I had to be done by 6 p.m. and all of a sudden, it forced me to say no to a bunch of stuff, which having extra time didn't do. It forced me to say, no, I can't spend longer in that meeting. No, I, I can't get involved in this, whatever this threat is, like, whatever. And again, nowadays, like a lot of the time gets eaten up on social media, and there's so many distractions now. Yeah. In order to, you know, to rupture your focus, and I started to realize that that my focus, my ability to maintain that focus was my job. And when I made the priority right, it changed everything. Everything. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists, you may just not know it, but that's OK. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about. What to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.

Ryan Rutan: That prioritization is so important, man. I, and that's, I think for me, you know, deadlines aren't scary. They're they're liberating because it forces you to prioritize what actually matters. And I think the more diligent you become about this, the better you get at it, the more clarity you get around, like, what actually does move the needle here, to your point earlier around like if you really do look at your time. And like add up the time spent on Slack answering questions that probably didn't really need to be answered. We talked about this once before, it's part of this exercise, in fact, um, we may have talked about the pot or not, I don't remember, but I remember just not answering emails. I just stopped answering certain emails, and you know what happened? If it was really important and my input was really needed, they'd email again and then I would answer. Now some people might go like, well that's that's really rude, or that's a waste of the other person's time to make them ask twice. You want to know the funny part about that is, about 10% of the time they ask

Wil Schroter: twice, every time, right? Like

Ryan Rutan: I would have wasted all that other time, and like, look, if you're the founder, or you're the manager, you're whoever, like, your time is by nature more. Valuable because you have to spread and create impact across the entire organization. You bet. And so if you're spending your time answering what turned out to be 90% just waste, not a great trade-off. So I was always willing to say like, look, yeah, that might be a pain for that person to have to ask me twice, but that's better than me answering 90 out of 100 emails that didn't need my response.

Wil Schroter: I think there's another point here too. What I got really good at, really, really good at. Was taking big things and making them uh tiny bits. So kind of, you know, the the the concept of how do you move a mountain one pebble at a time. I became a ninja at taking really big things that I needed to get done. Like, for example, if I need to write a book, I'm like, I can write any book, you name it, write one paragraph at a time. And when, when I say that people like, oh, that's trite, you still have to write the whole book. No, you don't. All you have to do. I write one paragraph today. That's it. Your entire job is one paragraph. That's all you have to do. You keep doing that on a daily basis, and that's, you know, what we've done so well at this company. And that shit adds up.

Ryan Rutan: It does. That's that compounding effect I was talking about, right? You just keep doing, you keep consistently being militant about your time, the amount that is saved, and the amount of stuff that gets done, really, really stacks up.

Wil Schroter: And so, you know, Ryan, you, you know, I've talked about where, you know, I'm in the process of building a house right now and and I built every cabinet, every closet, every vanity, a lot of the furniture, staircases, like everything inside this house, in my free time, and it's not a small house, right? And I say that to say like, where do you find the time? I'm like, I've always had the time. The, the problem wasn't finding it, the, the problem was it was taking away my um my distractions, but here's how I do it. At 4 in the morning, I wouldn't recommend this to anybody, but at 4 in the morning, I go into my workshop, and every single day, for just a few hours a day, I get one thing done. Right, it, it could be the equivalent of like, dude, but it compounds. No, you know, let's say I'm building a kitchen cabin. I'm just using that as an example of output. I don't say I have to build the whole kitchen. Nope. I say on Tuesday morning, I have to get up. I have to go into my workshop, and I have to just build what we call the carcass, just like the uh the outer part to the thing. That's all I have to do. And I have to be laser focused on just that piece, like it has to be and it gets done. Everything has to be done. I don't think about. The fact that I have to do 100 more, or how about like when you came over and we were building uh drawers together, right? 7272 drawers, right? Like 72 drawers and these are massive drawers, somebody's like 4 ft wide. 72 drawers is a bananas number of drawers to build, but what I did is I'd go in each day and I'd say, OK, all I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna put what we call a data in in one of the the drawer sides. That's it. It's all I'm gonna do, and it's gonna do like 100 of them today, right, in my few hours, and tomorrow I'm gonna do another, tomorrow another. And I use this just so people can visualize like this unit of work, and guess what? You stack that every day consistently, dude, there's an entire house build out, right? Like, exactly like that, not because I took 2 years off to build a house, because I dedicated a few hours every day with insane focus on a micro task, and it added up. Now that's, that's house, but we applied the same exact methodology. To startups.com.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, that's it. When you put constraints on, it doesn't limit the output. It cuts the crap that was limiting the output because it was never output in the first place. Right? There's so much stuff that just gets in the way, and that's the beauty of that level of focus and just saying, I'm just gonna do this one thing, because it doesn't leave room for those other distractions. It doesn't leave room for those other time stealing things that weren't going to get to output in the first place. They were never part of output, right, regardless of, man, some of them have their space. And they are important, right? Yes, we do still need to talk to our teams, we do need slack, but we do have to be mindful about the fact that there it does eat time and it does take away from productivity.

Wil Schroter: It doesn't, yeah, and this isn't say that I, I, you know, never respond to slack, never have meetings, never like, that's ridiculous. It's look at what those are and ask yourself, where is the core bit of value in optimizing for that. Then take that discipline, take that, take your own discipline and expand it across the organization, because here's where it gets really interesting. If I could be, let's say, 23 times more productive, what happens if I can get 100 other people to be 23 times more productive, or said differently for other people, so I don't need 12 people.

Ryan Rutan: You're compounding the compounding at that point. Yeah, this is where we get some exponential differences in in output.

Wil Schroter: Here's how we institutionalize this, uh, and Ryan, you and I have been living through this for a very long time and we can speak volumes to the efficacy. What we did. is we took all of our timelines as a company, and we moved all of them for months and months and months, like we do planning, of course, like ahead of time so you know, kind of know what path is. You gotta know where you're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we don't give anything more than a week. So everything has to be done by Friday. Now people are, this is what people on Reddit freak out. You can't get everything done by Friday. All software can't be built by Friday. Do you not ship features that can't get done by Friday? No moron, sorry, I'm a little fired up about, uh, about Reddit. Um, that doesn't make any sense. Like, why would you even say that,

Ryan Rutan: right? I hear Reddit coming for you right now.

Wil Schroter: I hear the clack of a of 1000 neck beards upon you. And so, uh, no, but what it is is, no, you basically what you do is you say what part of it can we get done by

Ryan Rutan: break it down and focus on that, the data in the side of the drawer face. That's right.

Wil Schroter: That's it. It's an eight-week project. What can you get done on this project? What segment can you get done by

Ryan Rutan: Friday? Yeah, Reddit saw you hitting people with sticks until they shipped the entire product in a week. That's what they were like, You're for, you're overworking, you're micromanaging, you're doing all that. No, no, we're just saying like just figure out what you can get done by Friday. And what's interesting is once you start doing that, you start thinking about what can I get done by Friday. It turns out you actually get a lot more done by Friday when you pick Friday as the target when you break things down into smaller pieces, because here's the fun thing. You can always do more, right? If it turns out, like if you pick too small of a target, you can add on to that, yeah, right, but you can't do the inverse. I'll use meetings as the example, right? So if you set it for an hour meeting and you spend the hour, there's nothing you can do about that. You set a meeting for 15 minutes, it turns out it needs 30, you can add 15 more minutes to the meeting and Get to 30 and get the outcome that you needed, but if it turns out you could have done it in 15, what the hell did you just do with the other 45 minutes? You wasted it wasted it for everybody that was sitting in that room.

Wil Schroter: I had the same thing. I do in my office hours, which I'm gonna start here in an hour, and I do back to back office hours with our founders every week. And they're only 15 minute increments uh for my office hours, and everyone initially is like, well, what am I gonna possibly get done in 15 minutes? I was like a lot if you get to the point, and when people get on the the call, they're prepared, they move quickly, they like uh uh we don't talk about the weather, we just get straight into it exactly what they need help with, right? 15 minutes. The timeline forces focus. Yeah, and so let's keep building on that. Again, our Reddit mob was like, well, you're just trying to like, you know, grind everybody down. Like, no, you're missing the point. It's actually the polar opposite. Number one, our team sets their own deadlines, so it would only be a problem if I was telling them they have to do something by Friday that takes 3 weeks, which is how everybody

Ryan Rutan: you have to ship 3 weeks of stuff in 1 week. It's not at all

Wil Schroter: what we're

Ryan Rutan: saying,

Wil Schroter: right? Instead, we're saying it's a 3 week project, I get it. What part, what 3 can you get done by Friday? Now here's the other thing that that was really unexpected that came out of this. When something takes 3 weeks to do, right, or, you know, you have, you have a 3 week timeline, it's like this weight that's over your shoulders the entire time. It's like when you have a term paper due, and you know at the the beginning of the the semester that it's gonna be due at the end of the semester, and there's this weird weight that just sits with you the entire time.

Ryan Rutan: And are you saying that people might procrastinate in that same period? Never, never know.

Wil Schroter: But, but here's the more important part though, at the end of the week, you can just go home, right? You got your work done. Instead of saying, well, it's not really done cause I still have 2 more weeks' worth of work. Well, guess what? On Friday or whatever your timeline is, you can stop worrying about that because you actually accomplished what you're supposed to accomplish, and you can go be free. This was one of my number one pet peeves personally. Is that I could, no matter what I did at work, I could never feel like I like like I was done ever. I always like

Ryan Rutan: when

Wil Schroter: you

Ryan Rutan: pick things, if you pick something with a two month time frame at the end of every day until that whole thing is done, there is a sense of incompletion. There is and it's a huge issue,

Wil Schroter: by the way. Yeah, it's

Ryan Rutan: it's also

Wil Schroter: it's

Ryan Rutan: horribly demoralizing,

Wil Schroter: demoralizing. I was just gonna say exactly that. And and I found it as much in myself. One of the problems I have is like, a lot of the things that I do have very long timelines, right? So if we're gonna like release a new feature, like the, the amount of planning that goes around that, that, you know, the round of development takes months and months and months and months and months. So I can never leave today and say, oh, I got everything done. So the first thing I do, and I'm very uh militant about this, the first thing I do with my day is I say, what is the absolute least I need to get done today? And by least that doesn't mean that I'm undershooting the mark. I'm saying, no matter what this has to get done, ideally I'll get done more. To be honest, I usually don't get more done, but I think that's part of the interesting part of the exercise.

Ryan Rutan: Well, you start getting pretty good at estimating what you can actually accomplish, I think.

Wil Schroter: But I think, but the bigger thing is, I'm doing a better job of accounting for the fact that there's, it's not like nothing else will happen in my day. So, you know, let's say that that I need to write a newsletter, right, you know, for for for what we do with this podcast and stuff like that. I know that it'll take a couple hours, and if I had nothing else to do in the day, like truly like I, I was on an island somewhere, and no one else could talk to me, maybe that's how long it would take, but that's totally unrealistic. I'm a CEO of a company, right? Like, all kinds of stuff comes up all day long. Yep.

Ryan Rutan: It's start, stop, start, stop, and each time you lose, you lose steam, you lose momentum.

Wil Schroter: 100%. And so I know it's going to take longer, so I can't stack 3 more of those up because the amount of uh distractions I'm gonna have are meaningful, OK? But now, if I don't account for that, and I say, well, hey, a newsletter only takes 2 hours, so I'll do 2 hours for that and 2 hours for this next thing, 1 hour for the next thing, 1 hour for the next thing, where I lose is I will never actually get all that stuff done, right? Because, or more specifically, I'll get distracted in so many places that no one thing will get done. I'd rather be in a position where all I'm doing is putting dataos in the sides of of drawers for like, you know, for hours straight. And yes, maybe I'd like to go build the drawers too, but so long as I get this one thing done, I can then move on to the next. So I just say laser focused on one thing at a time. And as a result, I get a lot of shit done.

Ryan Rutan: You do. And like let's circle back to that point around like the longer time frames and where that becomes all that that demoralizing weight that sits over you, because part of what's happening on a daily basis, this is why like when you have these longer time frames, you have more you have to accomplish before you feel like you've accomplished anything, when you don't break it down into its constituent parts and and deal with them in that way. Is that you do know that those distractions are gonna come into play, right? And that's why there's that constant pressure. Well if I just get a little bit more done today, right? If I just get, if I had just gotten a little more done then then maybe if that happens or if this happens, and our ability to predict these things on a daily basis gets a bit better, but when the minute you expand that to like even a week can be difficult sometimes, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks. A month out, 6 months out, forget it, man. You ask the team what they can get done in 6 months, you're gonna get some bloated plan that is maybe 15 to 20% accurate, right? Ask what you can get done by Friday, you get accuracy and magic, it actually happens. OK,

Wil Schroter: let's stick with that. It actually happens. You see, if we were to say, what can you get done by next Friday? Number one, a million things can happen between now and next Friday. So you, you, the moment is still valid,

Ryan Rutan: we still need to do it, right? Yeah,

Wil Schroter: you name it, right? a million things change, OK? The second thing is, if I'm not accountable for until next Friday. I don't need to act with with any sense of purpose or urgency, and people give urgency a bad rap. They think urgency means I'm being sloppy and stressed and things like that. Urgency just means there's a priority to it. There's just a priority

Ryan Rutan: you're clear on the priority. That's all it means to me, right? This is the urgent one,

Wil Schroter: yeah correct, right? And that just means I might have 9 other things to do, but this is the priority. I need to get this done more so than everything. Yep. We've been working off this system for well over a decade. It is so easy to manage to. And again, I think the greatest thing is the reason that, you know, we can have these uh leadership meetings and people will say, hey, I actually already know what I need to do is because it ain't freaking hard to know what you need to do in 4.5 days, right? Like it's so incrementally easy to manage. And again, I know everybody takes this to software. I'm actually least concerned about software when I talk about this, right? Ryan, you can appreciate this as as as a CMO. Marketing is incredibly hard to manage around timelines. What are you gonna get done, like, you know, uh, what are you gonna achieve, etc. Making smaller parts is incredibly important. Sales is another great example. Yeah, how many outbound calls, uh, you know, what kind of response rates did you get, etc. Like there's so many things that if you manage them in a in a smaller chunk. They're easier to talk about. When you expand them out, when you expand out these initiatives for like a month, even

Ryan Rutan: looking to evaluate them very difficult.

Wil Schroter: They're too morphous.

Ryan Rutan: Yep, and again, like it's it both compresses time in a way that creates focus. Yeah, and it's, but it's also very free, right? So that the compression doesn't come with pain, it's it's the opposite. It creates freedom for all that other stuff too, right? So yeah, let's talk about what what do we do with all this this this newfound time.

Wil Schroter: That's the part everybody on Reddit missed. I was like, dude, everybody thought I was being like the ultimate slave driver uh all they did is read the headline. I get it, social media, but, but I was like, no, here's what's magical about this. We freed up so much time to go do other stuff, and again, everybody misread it to me like compressing your time so I can make you do 5 more things. I was like, no, those 5 more things are go home, go to the gym, you want, I don't care, right? Like, point is you already got your work done here. You couldn't feel finished and you couldn't leave, right? Like, who's

Ryan Rutan: opposed

Wil Schroter: to that? I blows my mind.

Ryan Rutan: Gotta read be beyond the headline. You buried the lead on that one, Will. I

Wil Schroter: did, it was my fault, but but the the point is, if we can say, look, if we stay, if we keep our timelines compressed, if we stay focused, and we just knock out the stuff that, you know, needs to get done for this week, then all of us can say, you should be leaving your desk, so to speak, metaphorically right now, because you're done. How good does that feel in a business that is not well known for saying you're done for the day? Like, like we don't clock out of this business ever. How good does it feel to be able to walk out the door and like, you know what, for today I'm good. I'll

Ryan Rutan: do I got what I need done,

Wil Schroter: right? Go enjoy that soccer game or go enjoy yoga or go it doesn't matter,

Ryan Rutan: man, right? More time doesn't have to mean more work. It can, and sometimes it does. You can sometimes the ROI is a nap, right? Or it's time to actually like make a healthy lunch and eat it. I can't help but look at reclaimed time as founder equity, and that you get to reinvest where it matters the most, wherever that might be, right? That might be personally, that might be professionally, that might be with the team, might be where wherever, but I think that, you know, the point isn't to fill every hour, it's to make every hour that you do use count. And I think that's where it most often goes wrong for founders.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, I agree and I think for like for me, because I know every day I have this system in place, I never have to feel like any day I have to like boil the ocean. On any given day, I'm like, you know what, today is just put Datos in in drawer sides, right? That's it. It's all I gotta do today, right? And if I do

Ryan Rutan: for everybody listening, I have to, I have to do this, Will, because nobody knows what a Dao is. Will's making tiny little slots in the side of a board that he's gonna stick in something called a biscuit. Which is just a flat piece of wood that fits exactly the same size as the slot he made so he can connect it to another piece of wood with glue and it'll be that much more uh structurally rigid.

Wil Schroter: That ability to be able to condition ourselves and everybody around us to be able to say, oh man, if I just get today's thing done. I'm free. I can go invest that time wherever the hell else I want is awesome. If what you're, you know, if what we were saying was, I want you to take 4 hours of the work and get it done in 2 hours so I can give you 4 hours more work to get done in 2 hours, that, that breaks, right? Because then you gotta realize when you compress time, you're also burning all of your focus and and like we talked about before, that is definitely not linear, it's not anything close to it. But on the other hand, if you spread your focus over like 8, 10 hours, that's way worse. I would rather have that focus put into exactly what I need to get done in say a 2 hour block, and then be able to take the next 2 hours off to do anything, take a nap for that matter, then to try to spread it across 4 hours and have nothing to show for it.

Ryan Rutan: Correct. Yeah. I think that's the thing, man, like. The founder fantasy is like having 25 hours in a day. The founder reality is that there's at least 10 of those are wasted. Yeah, you already have them. That's what you need to do. Stop chasing more hours and start respecting the ones you already have by doing something extremely useful with them. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone, you don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes. Connect with bootstrapped founders and the advisors helping them win in the Startups.com community. Check out the Startups.com community at www.startups.com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.