How to wear many hats and stay productive
Context switching is the mind killer
Being CEO of a small startup means owning the responsibilities of several different roles. At least, that’s what it’s felt like for me since Alejandro and I took the reigns of SharpestMinds last summer.
Previously, as CTO, I was also “wearing many hats”, to use a startup cliche—I was the entire engineering team. In reality, I was a full-stack software developer with occasional forays outside my core competency—to do data analysis, for example.
But, as CEO, the range and diversity of “hats” I have to wear has dramatically increased. I find myself with responsibilities in accounting, marketing, product management, design, customer support, HR, and a long-tail of other little jobs—many of which could turn into full-time roles as we scale.
A lot of this work is outside my zone of competency. And I sometimes find myself longing for the days where I could just write code all day. But I’m learning a lot about a wide breadth of things. This learning is valuable on it’s own and I’m becoming a more effective generalist. It will also help when it comes to hiring. I’m not sure I would have been able to properly recruit and vet a marketer 6 months ago. Now, after doing the job myself for a while, I have a much better grasp of what would be needed.
But, for now, I have to juggle these different responsibilitiesto keep the company alive. Besides having to do things outside my comfort zone, the biggest challenge is time management.
On any given week, I have a big list of disparate tasks. Instead of being a slave to my to-do list—hopping from one task to the next, I’ve been making more efforts to batch and schedule my work.
Context switching is the mind killer. I want minimize how much I have to bounce around between different roles each day. I was already doing this on the daily—using time-block planning to batch and schedule my tasks for the day. But recently I’ve started zooming out and planning my time on a weekly level.
I batch all my marketing tasks for Friday, for example. And I put on my product manager hat on Thursday mornings. When a new task pops up that fits in with one of those contexts, I have time scheduled for it already. Most tasks are important but not urgent. It’s okay if they don’t get done today. But they should still get done.
Not only does this help reduce context switching, but having time scheduled for many of my tasks reduces the anxiety and mental clutter that comes with a long to-do list. If I know I need to do something, but I don’t know when I will do it, then it’s hard to forget about it and actually focus.
In case you’re wondering, I schedule time for writing (e.g. writing this newsletter) every morning. But, if this habit keeps developing, there might be a world where I schedule my writing time to one day a week to maximize my focus.
Now, back to building. Or—since it’s Friday—back to marketing.
-Russell