8 things startups can do early on to optimize for focus & productivity:

1. Synchronous meetings only for p0 and p1 items

All meetings should be 25 minutes by default with the ability to extend by 15 minutes if necessary.

Each meeting should have a clear agenda that outlines its context, asks, action items, etc.

Meetings should be brief & impactful
2. Asynchronous for everything else

- Stand ups
- Project demos / updates
- Design / Eng handoffs
- Documentation walkthrough

A simple flowchart for meetings:
3. Strive for 90% focused work / 10% meeting & sync time

- No meetings on Tues & Thurs
- Encourage turning off Slack & distracting notifications
- Track your time to better understand your distractions
- Buy your team a copy of Deep Work & Getting Things Done
4. No recurring meetings

Recurring meetings are a productivity killer. Try to avoid them when possible.

Instead, assess whether a follow-up meeting is needed at the end of each meeting.
5. Short sentences > Long paragraphs

We often spend too much time drafting the perfect Slack message or tend to over-explain ourselves over email.

Encourage succinct communication whether it's through words, emojis, or a @loom recording.

https://t.co/gK1dNUvznn
6. Keep a simple work stack at the beginning

A stack that *just* works:

- Slack: keep # of channels at a min.
- Loom: async updates that require visual & voice
- G Docs / Notion: documentation & tasks
- Whimsical: visual documentation
- Gmail / Superhuman: external comms. only
7. Keep a flat hierarchy

Giving out vanity titles "CxO, VP of X, etc" early on makes you come off less reputable & can also be detrimental when hiring senior leadership.

If everyone in the org is considered equal, your teams' willingness to lean in & share––feels more welcomed.
8. Limit your distractions as a Founder

Avoid conferences. Avoid podcasts. Limit your use on social media.

Your time is better spent at your desk and/or with your team.

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There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

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