Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have a friend of mine stop by, and actually had five minutes free to go out for a cup of coffee. We got to talking about where we were, and the things that were sucking up all our available bandwidth. He had recently helped sell the startup he was working at to a much larger company, worked the minimum amount of time necessary to finish off his responsibilities and has branched out into a new new thing. It’s always interesting to speak to someone who has gone round with the full lifecycle of a company and on to the new one. He reflected on his previous ridiculous hours, and his current ridiculous hours, and the fact that, despite his best efforts, the most meaningless stuff fills up all that time. When I asked him what his solution was to getting actual work done, he responded without skipping a beat, “Find a barber.”
The thing about it is, George Burns was right – being in a startup is a horrible bitch goddess. For every time you get excited about doing something really cool for the first time (and making a real difference), you have literally ONE THOUSAND stupid things that a million other people have done before, make zero difference to your business, and which you never ever had to think about when you were at company X. And, even worse, there will be weeks on end where it seems like you’re not making any progress at all, and you’ll be forced to come up with your own motivation, and hold some light up at the end of the tunnel yourself because if you don’t, no one else will. And, in between where you are now and where you are going, you need to make sure you and all your compatriots stay hyper-focused without getting lost in the weeds. Simple!
The problem comes in balancing between these menial tasks and the long term vision. Your end goal shouldn’t be your total focus, or even a significant portion of your day, but if you’re in a startup, you should spend at least a minute or two thinking about where you’re going. If you don’t, you’re going to be staring at your feet, running along, when all of a sudden the ground disappears and you realize you’ve run off a cliff. Pick your head up and look around. The problem is, how do you find the time?
Let’s go back to his response about hair styling. The entire idea behind finding a barber was not just finding any barber, but finding someone local, who you can book quickly and setup a recurring appointment. I understood his point exactly (ironically, this came from someone who had nary a hair on his head). By setting up such a simple solution to a simple problem, whatever else happens, you’ve got that sofa problem handled.. You have to take an aggressive look across your business and your life and find a solution for as many niggling little problems as you can: regular paper, coffee, filters, water delivery; automated billing of your cloud servers, mobile phone, adsense account from your credit card; car service that comes to your office for pickup rather than finding a cab; doctor and dentist appointments that are upstairs from your offices – whatever it takes so you can stop thinking of the little things.
I’m not saying you’re going to be able to get rid of it all, or that you should be spending like mad – sometimes the blinds just need to be put up and spending a ton of money for an installer doesn’t make sense. But these little three minute savings really do add up, and you have to be brutally defensive of your time, especially when I guarantee your baby will want all the time you have and more. So trust me – find a barber.
