First Things First

I routinely see startups make the mistake of failing to put the first thing first. The first thing is existential, has the highest impact, and can redefine the trajectory of the company. A startup should focus its time and energy on the first thing. Doing so increases its chances of survival and breakout success.

This advice sounds too obvious to be worth mentioning, so surely only naive people make this error? I wish that were true, but I have seen otherwise smart, hard-working folks waste time, energy, and money by not putting first things first1.

No single reason dominates why people fail to put first things first, but it is worth enumerating a few common scenarios to help you more easily recognize failure patterns. Some folks are so busy working they do not stop to ask if their work is worth doing or worth doing right now. Sometimes people enjoy the task they are working on, especially when they are experts, and are reluctant to take up less enjoyable activities or things where they lack expertise.

Even though there are countless reasons you might not be focusing your attention on first things, you can dramatically improve your odds by regularly asking yourself what the highest impact thing you can be doing for the company is, and if your work is moving the needle on that thing. If you are not on track to move the needle it is time to make a change. By creating space for others to ask you the same question, you can help counter your blind spots. I try to solicit this feedback in my 1:1s and carve out time to think about this at least weekly.

When I introduce first things first I encounter three types of objections. The first is from folks who do not want to change. I feel that – change is hard! It is unlikely you will make smooth and continuous progress toward a better outcome. Learnings and reality are both lumpy. The alternative to hard change is knowing that you chose to not do the most to succeed and that you valued the status quo more. This realization makes starting the change easier.

The second objection to putting first things first is when people ask about routine work. How do you ensure payroll goes out and floors are swept? Here context and time management matter. When you are resource constrained there will always be some grunt work that you have to do, the key is in focusing on the most important and the most urgent items. You will have to triage.

The last objection is some variant of not wanting to prioritize2. I see this every time someone tells me they have seven top priorities. Definitionally there can be only one number-one priority; by having so many number-one priorities you have none. There is no good way to prioritize between adding profile photos and reducing cloud bills if features and cost reduction are equally prioritized. Instead, you must use one of the many prioritization frameworks and create a rank order.

Prioritizing first things first is not only for founders and executives. It can be applied at every level of an organization by asking yourself if your work is having the highest impact on the things in your sphere of influence.

  1. There was a team of very talented engineers with 12 months of cash left who spent over a month architecting a Kubernetes deployment infrastructure instead of building a product. Even in the best case, the deployment infrastructure wouldn’t have mattered for another year. They failed to achieve product traction and were lucky to be acquihired.

    If they had asked themselves if their infrastructure work would have moved the needle on their business they would have realized the answer was “no”, and could then have spent more time developing their product thesis.

    As a second example, there was an enterprise company taking a complex product to market where sales were less than 1% of projections. Instead of making the hard call to change, the CEO spent their time migrating payroll systems and approving accounting audits because they thought that was what a well-run company should do. Even though the company was well capitalized, it focused on addressing the sales problem a year too late and eventually wound down. ↩︎

  2. Derek Sivers has a similar rule in his personal life: if you’re not saying “HELL YEAH” about something, say no. Time is always a constrained resource and this means that to make room for the most important things (HELL YEAH) you have to pass over other good options (merely yes). ↩︎

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