
Don't. Waste. Time. - malomalo
http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-waste-time
======
edw519
When it comes to efficiency/effectiveness, I prefer to focus on "Do" instead
of "Don't".

Richard Hamming (from "You and Your Research"):

    
    
      1. What are the most important problems in your field?
      2. Are you working on one of them?
      3. Why not?
    

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html>

Paul Graham's (from "Good and Bad Procrastination") generalization of Richard
Hamming:

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

<http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html>

edw519's generalization of Paul Graham:

Work on the most important thing until it's not the most important thing any
more.

I have developed this excellent/horrible habit of not being able to focus on
very much of anything if there was something more important hanging over my
head.

Excellent in keeping me from trivial pursuits. Horrible at meal time, bed
time, other people time. I'm still a work in progress.

~~~
balsam
One thing I've always wanted to ask PG is: does he think that helping smart
people to get rich flipping companies (usually not by doing the "coolest
thing") is cooler than making a great Lisp? One answer to why not, is: "No
money".

~~~
noahc
The really cool thing about money is that it makes an excellent points system.
It's neat that you can trade green paper for physical things, but more
importantly money is a way to keep score to two decimal places.

Often times when people talk about money they are talking about resource
gathering. At some point the resource gathering turns off and the money
becomes an easy proxy for points.

So I'm not sure that creating another Lisp is less cool, but it can't be
easily measured. What if IBM uses your Lisp for everything they do, how does
that compare to another guys Lisp that has 6.5 million downloads. Who is
cooler?

~~~
gbog
Money is not a good point system, except if you think a big mac is more
valuable than a book by Jane Austeen.

~~~
noahc
What does this even mean? I assume that you're talking about in a moral sense
because of the value judgement you appear to have made.

Of course, when I say 'good' I don't mean in the moral sense. Imagine you were
to design a way for people to keep score and they had to use tangible things.
What would make one tangle item better than another? Here's a quick list I
came up with...

1\. Easily transferable. Money fulfills this because it can be transferred
electronically. The physical good need not even exist. Money when talking
about it as a point system is strictly an abstract. Put another way it is a
stored value that can later be redeemed for big macs or Jane Austeen books.

2\. It must be difficult to acquire. Money you can't just print (Well you can,
but it is mostly worthless). The difficulty makes it more of a way to keep
score in the game of life. There needs to be a way to prevent someone from
adding to their score arbitrarily.

3\. You must be able to keep score at small enough intervals. Keeping score by
buying big macs becomes unproductive when you get into the millions of dollar
range. At the same time keeping score in the form of luxury cars becomes
impossible in the thousands of dollar range.

That's why I said money is good. Not in the moral sense that those who have
more money are better people or some form of Prosperity theology. Just that
money has many of the traits needed to provide a way to keep score.

~~~
gbog
> in a moral sense

No, not really. You said money is "an excellent points system". I inferred
that if it was the case, the price of current products sold on the market
should reflect well their inherent value, which I think it doesn't.

Money is is too ductile and doesn't involve enough the "donor", a bit like
"vote by SMS for your favorite star". The voting system itself is still not
involving enough the person giving the vote.

My favorite "point system" is "feet-voting": the best city is the place where
people move to, the best country is the one that people want to go to live,
raise their kids, etc. This evaluation was used during the Warring State
period in China, and it induces the kings and feudal lords to enforce justice
and proper retributions. If not, their administrate will move away. Trying to
force them to stay by forbidding expatriation will push them away even
stronger. And this voting-with-your-life thing is such a deep decision from
the voters that we can trust them to ponder long-term consequences.

Granted, this evaluation cannot apply to each and every case, but in the web
services it has a clear equivalent in how many users stay on a site and use
it.

~~~
goblin89
> if it was the case, the price of current products sold on the market should
> reflect well their inherent value, which I think it doesn't.

Money is good since it provides a reference point, a solid ground for
measurement and comparison. Although often you need to take into account some
non-obvious stuff when you compare two amounts of money (esp. prices), it
still does work.

For ‘inherent value’ each person would see their own price tag. And I'm sure
my tag would reflect smaller amount for Jane Austen's book than yours.

And feet-voting is good if you can judge on a large scale, which is not always
applicable. Edit: by the way, most people would feet-vote for a big mac rather
than a book (that is, if we were able to conduct a really unbiased experiment
with random selection of people).

~~~
gbog
> most people would feet-vote for a big mac rather than a book

Seriously? If you had to be thrown on a desert island and bring only one
thing, would you bring a short term belly chemical satisfaction asset like a
big mac, or a long term spirit satisfaction asset like a Classic book in your
mother tongue?

~~~
goblin89
Don't forget that most people on this planet reportedly are a) poor and b) not
having English as their mother tongue (probably not even speaking it).

~~~
gbog
It is a mistake to think that poor people don't value cultural assets. And I
used Jane Austeen as an example, obviously.

------
hrabago
The key is to identify how you can best contribute, so you know whether or not
you're wasting your time. If you're a small team, everyone's time might be
best spent coding to deliver the product. A slightly bigger team might mean
your time is best coordinating. The overhead of a "meeting" might be worth
making sure everyone's aware of the design instead of creating isolated pieces
of great code that doesn't work well with each other.

I might be wasting time writing code when I can best contribute by taking care
of 'overhead' so my team isn't blocked - there's an anecdote here somewhere of
the PM who would buy coffee for the team so the team can focus on producing
code - or i might be wasting time taking care of 'overhead' that doesn't
matter yet (planning the optimum office layout) when I can best contribute by
writing code.

To know whether or not you're wasting time, you have to know what makes one
work "fake" and the other "good", and my list may be vastly different from
yours.

------
zacharycohn
Opened up HN. Saw this headline at #1. Posted this comment. Now I'm closing HN
and going back to work.

~~~
Fliko
You talk about (on topic of why you need 500 karma to downvote) understanding
the community and not posting contentless posts 5 posts ago and now you post
this. The irony levels are off the charts!

------
earbitscom
There is some truth to this but doing things like paperwork quickly can lead
to a lot of trouble. Read _Anything You Want_ by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers.
He recommends not worrying about having Terms and Conditions on your website,
and all kinds of other "formalities". Then he says breezing through some
paperwork on a loan from his father accidentally cost him, I think, $2
Million. Letting his employees handle their stock option plan resulted in a
profit sharing plan that gave every dollar to the employees. When he rescinded
it, they hated him moving forward.

------
leak
Good article. "Outsource all over the place" is so important. Pay some expert
for a few hours of work that would take you a week (ie: healthcare).

The one thing that I do think is important though is business cards. We got
business cards before we even got 1 line of code written. It just seems like
an established way to exchange info at events more so than using "bump", I
think.

~~~
dchest
_Pay some expert for a few hours of work that would take you a week (ie:
healthcare)._

Note that communicating with such expert sometimes can take more time and be
more frustrating than if you did this yourself. It's not all black and white.

~~~
mechanical_fish
True, but one of the things an expert is expert at is knowing how to
communicate with new clients and ask the right questions.

The expert often knows how to communicate more effectively than a non-expert
would anticipate, because she has seen all the common issues before. That's
what _expert_ means. When a non-expert encounters a problem for the first time
it always feels like a uniquely strange and complicated new thing. But more
often than not an expert will listen to you describe your problem for two
minutes, reach into a drawer and pull out a standard design that fits 85% of
your use case, adjust the settings on the five standard knobs to cover another
10% of your use case, and then focus on the remaining five per cent... or,
perhaps, just deliver the solution to you and let _you_ tinker with the
remaining five per cent.

It's hard to appreciate this process until you've been through it several
times in different contexts. Because one of the things that non-experts are
_not_ expert at is: Knowing what the experts can do for you. Telling the
difference between a problem that benefits from lavish amounts of personal
attention and one that can be solved in ten minutes by someone for whom your
problem is a daily routine and who knows just what to ask.

------
jpdoctor
Most blogs on time-management pale in comparison to The Ultimate Productivity
Blog: <http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/>

------
blacksmythe

      >> Founder equity splits
    

The time to do founder equity splits is before you make a product that
delights customers. If you think that is something you can work out after, you
don't understand human nature.

Also, if you have problems working out founder equity splits, you probably
have the wrong team.

------
marquis
Great tips. I've had the fortune of working with enough diverse freelancers
over the years that most things that we don't have time for (design, for
example), we can get done quickly and cost-efficiently. I really recommend
sending small jobs out to people you can establish long-term relationships
with over time, who will work with your budget. It pays off immensely.

------
dvdhsu
He mentions that one shouldn't care much about business cards: I disagree. The
small details, after you ship your major product, are the most important.
They're what truly delight your users after the first 'wow'.

I would suggest a startup to, yes, first focus on the product. Once the
product is done though, they should focus on the small, "trivial", details.

~~~
andrewflnr
I think he means the entire article to apply mainly to pre-product startups.
He would probably agree that after that is the time to work on business cards
and stuff.

~~~
Alex3917
I think this is incorrect. The business card is the first deliverable of every
startup, and whether or not you have a well-designed card is one of the
strongest signals that your first prospective customers will use to decide
whether or not you can ship what you say you are going to. Trying to save a
couple hours and a couple hundred bucks by using one of the templates at
Kinkos instead of working with a designer is a huge mistake.

Clearly you are going to be meeting tons of people and telling them about your
startup if you are really serious about it, so not having a well-designed
business card from day one is just throwing away tens of thousands of dollars
worth of leadgen.

~~~
mikeklaas
This might be good advice in some sectors I'm unfamiliar with, but I can
categorically say that for 90% of startups, your advice to procure
professionally-designed business cards as an early priority is simply
bollocks.

------
wmougayar
Another useful thing: Stick to deadlines. Otherwise, there is a tendency to
take as much time as time is available. Don't assume that time is infinite.
Give yourself short deadlines all day long and you'll get a lot more things
done.

------
omarThanawalla
Thank you for this article. I coincidently read this quote earlier today and I
think it relates really well:

"Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is
production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be
forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as
perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing" -Thomas Edison

------
lifeformed
What I take from this is that time is more important than money; exchange
money for time whenever possible. In many situations you have the option to
exchange X dollars for Y hours of freed time - it's important to think about
these situations in these terms, because it doesn't always look that way.

------
burnstek
Just to touch on the essence of this article for interested parties: this
concept is also known by the Japanese as "Gemba" and was popularized in
industry (among many other lean principles) by Toyota's production system.

------
evolution
I think lean methodology goes best with this. What matters in initial stages
is working prototype, validation and then MVP. Most of the initial time is
supposed to be dedicated to this than spending it with operations.

------
jessedhillon
Read his link about Series F stock; in order to implement such a plan it seems
that you would have to disregard his advice to just pick simple defaults when
incorporating.

------
shivang
Great article. The other most important thing which should be avoided in the
startups is "Premature Optimization"

~~~
mburst
Couldn't agree with you more. As long as the frontend works and appears fast
to the end user, you'll most likely have the time to play around with the
backend before you have to worry about optimizing and scaling.

------
unreal37
Where does "blogging" and "submitting your own writing to HN" fall on the
wasting time list?

~~~
dpritchett
Under marketing and recruiting. Note that the submitter is a two-time
cofounder with OP.

------
tribeofone
This article was a waste of my time.

------
nirvana
Here's a calculator for founder equity split:
<http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php>

(I think its faster than reading the whole QA session linked to in the
original post.)

~~~
talbina
Wrong post?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Good post; nirvana is referring to the link about equity splits at the
beginning of the post.

------
billpatrianakos
Sounds like common sense but you'd be amazed by how many people don't get it!
I'm working with 2 startup organizations (my own business and I'm on the board
of a charity) and I've seen a ton of time wasted on meta meetings (meetings
about the next meeting), and getting paperwork exactly right when it just
needs to be okay, etc.

Through my experience in my business I've been able to point them in the
direction this article suggests. Basically, we only spend time on things that
clearly get a goal achieved. The rest we just leave until we absolutely need
it. There are things that need to be finished correctly right now that don't
have an obvious impact on later success but those things are far fewer than
one might think.

------
suivix
Why can't I learn what 42 floors is without putting in my email? _Really_
annoying.

~~~
skmurphy
Even if you do they won't tell you anything more than is on the website.
Contact jaf12duke if you want details at this time (see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3188969> )

