The Struggle to Juggle
Tips for knowing which balls to juggle, which ones to drop, and how to do it all efficiently.
Hi Neo Family,
If you’re reading this, chances are you share the struggle of to-do lists that never get shorter. You might even face battling to-do lists (a Notion, an inbox, that envelope next to your desk that suddenly became a task list).
While there’s no silver bullet, there are ways to manage your attention that will result in more streamlined tasks.
To prioritize your time, you need priorities.
Regularly ask yourself a simple question – what’s the most important thing you should be doing? Does your team agree? That exercise alone is really powerful. In the early days of your company, have that conversation weekly.
Whether you’re building a startup like Ethena or a community like Neo, you should be guided by one ultimate goal: to build something people want. This means that you need to prioritize your time to support that goal.
There are a bunch of different ways to articulate the idea of focus. As Sequoia’s Ravi Gupta recently said on Invest Like the Best: “keep the main thing the main thing.”
Building your product, getting your product into the hands of users, and building your team – these are all places you should be spending your time. The way these manifest may differ from company to company. For example, Ethena sells to businesses so Roxanne spent her early days more on sales than marketing; but if it were B2C, she would have spent more time on marketing.
Regardless of the details, everyone needs a “main thing.”
Know when to reevaluate your priorities.
Early in a company, the key problem you’re trying to solve will likely change frequently because, hopefully, you’re solving problems so new ones crop up. Your time will be measured in days, then weeks, then months, then quarters.
At Ethena, we now do quarterly goal setting (we’re a Series B company) and that cadence feels right. In our very early days, the “main thing” would be something like “get 5 companies to sign a contract for our compliance training” and we were laser focused on that.
At Neo, we encourage brand-new companies to set granular week-over-week goals. Eventually this will shift to month-over-month and eventually quarterly. It’s for the same reason we suggest that young companies assess their growth weekly, whereas older ones should think longer term: month-over-month or year-over-year.
Once you have your priority, be efficient in execution.
The hardest thing is actually figuring out what you should be focused on. Once you have that (and your team agrees!) then it’s more of a tactical exercise of harnessing your energy in service of your goal.
Because this is a tactical exercise, certain tactics will work better for you than for others. Try out different tips/hacks, monitor their success, and see what sticks.
Here is a collection of a few of our favorites to get you started:
Just say no.
Have a template for your “no’s”: Saying “no” is really hard. Someone from college reaches out and wants to “pick your brain” but you know that it’s not a conversation you should be having right now. Or an investor says they’d love to just grab coffee, but you aren’t fundraising. Instead of debating whether and how to say no to each ask, make a template email (“Hey! I’m heads down, can we connect next quarter?”). If it doesn’t work towards your current goal, it’s not worth your time.
Use do-not-disturb. That’s it. That’s the trick. Turn it on for certain time increments and actually go heads down.
Learn how to communicate efficiently with your team. So much time can be lost in communications. “What did you mean by that Slack? What do you need from me?” Teach yourself and your team how to talk to each other efficiently. It sounds simple, but once you start doing it well, you’ll realize how inefficient most comms are - see here for an example.
Take care of yourself. All the science agrees - sleep, exercise, and time away are crucial to operating efficiently. Set a self-care goal the same way you set other work related goals each week.
Manage your task list.
Set weekly goals. Identify the few things that you want to accomplish each week. Whenever you’re unsure of what to do, look at that list and actively try to move one of those things forward.
Keep 2 to-do lists. Keep a to-do list for work and for your personal life. Write everything down as it comes up so you don’t spend time racking your brain and digging through messages to figure out what you should be doing.
Use work blocks. Block time on your calendar for when you are going to do a task. Put all the materials you need in the calendar invite. When that invite pops up, treat it like you would a meeting and knock out the task when you said you would. For some people this works better than a to-do list because it’s also a “When to-do this” list.
Keep track of time.
Timebox. Say, “I’m going to work on this award application for no more than 25 minutes. However good the application is then at the end of that 25 mins, I’m shipping it.”
Audit your calendar. Review your calendar at the beginning of the week and make sure it is set up the way you need it to be. Are all the meetings on your calendar necessary? Are they spaced out appropriately? (i.e., If you prefer back-to-back meetings and longer work blocks, can you make this happen?)
Save 5 mins at the end of every meeting for due outs. Spend five minutes at the end of each meeting gathering your next steps, so you don’t roll from Zoom to Zoom and lose all of the threads.
Leverage your community.
Ask around. Reading articles like this (we also highly recommended this First Round article on founder discipline) and asking your peers for their tips on how to be most productive can help you figure out what works best for you.
Find an accountability partner. Tell your co-worker, today, I’m going to finish X project and have them ask you about it at the end of the day.
We all feel like we don’t prioritize effectively sometimes, but what’s important is that we are getting better - progress, not perfection.
Have other tips to share? Let us know in the comments!
Roxanne Petraeus, CEO, Ethena
Roxanne Petraeus is the CEO and co-founder of Ethena, and a former army combat veteran, McKinsey consultant, and Rhodes Scholar. Ethena is reinventing corporate training with digestible, drip campaigns instead of dated, yearly videos. They're backed by Neo, GSV, Homebrew and others. Prior to Ethena, Roxanne served in the U.S. Army’s Special Operations, including a deployment to Afghanistan. She holds degrees from Harvard College and Oxford University.
Emily Cohen, Head of Accelerator and Community, Neo
Emily is the Head of Accelerator and Community at Neo. She studied Computer Science and Economics at Stanford, and previously worked as a Software Engineer at Google, Business Analyst at McKinsey, and has spent some time in event planning (a true passion!). She is passionate about community, new technologies, education, and supporting those around her. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, cooking, reading, puzzles, and bringing people together.