Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“Design your work for flow.”
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Founders must balance the conflicting demands on their time for activities outside the building (like customer conversations) and inside the building (like product development).
You must do both well, but how do you strike the right balance? Today, I’ll share some specific work hacks I use to design my work for flow.
Flow: a mental state of operation when you are at your best. When you are in flow, you are so immersed in an activity that nothing else matters. You lose your self-consciousness and sense of time.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. Group activities into Maker-time and Manger-time.
Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay on the two types of schedules: manager’s schedule and maker’s schedule.
Managers typically organize their day into one-hour blocks and spend each hour on a different task. Makers, like programmers and writers, must organize their day into longer blocks of uninterrupted time.
Founders are both makers and managers.
The cost of context switching is low (and expected) in a Manager’s schedule. It is high (and a productivity killer) in a Maker’s schedule.
Activities outside the building (customer interviews, usability testing, customer support) tend to be on a Manager’s schedule, while activities inside the building (design, coding) are usually on a Maker’s schedule.
The first step is grouping your work into one of these buckets.
II. The LEAN D.I.E.T
DIET is a mnemonic I created that stands for Discovery-Insights-Experiment-Traction. It’s how I break any complex project, whether a new major piece of writing or a product feature, into distinct stages where I start with
- Discovering more information about the problem at hand,
- Summarize my learnings into key Insights.
- Test these insights with a fast Experiment, and
- Double down on what works or pivot based on Traction.
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I combine these two strategies to achieve daily, weekly, and quarterly flow.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Achieving Daily Flow
As maker tasks require longer, uninterrupted blocks, I schedule them as 90-minute blocks on my calendar when distractions are minimal.
For me, that’s early morning, which has the added benefit of checking off important work first, which sets the right tone for the rest of the day.
I break the rest of the day into additional maker tasks depending on the day of the week (see next section) or manager tasks.
A typical day for me consists of four 90-day blocks (two in the morning and two in the afternoon) with time in between for breaks, walks, email, meditation, lunch, etc.
II. Achieving Weekly Flow
Next, I take advantage of customer downtime during the week. Since Mondays and Fridays are usually slower from a customer perspective, I use them for larger maker tasks like writing, designing, or strategizing. My writing topics are usually identified on Friday, outlined roughly over the weekend, written/proofed on Monday, and published/shared on Tuesday.
This leans Tuesdays and Wednesdays more towards manager activities like sales and customer conversations.
III. Achieving Quarterly Flow
Finally, I break big projects into 90-day cycles. 90 days is long enough to measure meaningful results (traction) yet short enough to know when something isn’t working.
Quarterly planning is also more uniform than monthly planning. There are four 13-week quarters in a year, which I subdivide into 2-week sprints.
Reserving some time at the start for cycle planning and some time at the end of cycle reviews leaves ten weeks (five sprints) for core work.
Each sprint is themed using the LEAN D.I.E.T, where I reserve more time upfront for initial discovery and learning.
“A problem well-defined is half-solved.”
- Charles Kettering
That's all for today. See you next week.
Ash
Author of Running Lean and creator of Lean Canvas
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P.S. Longer article here.