No matter what you do as a bootstrapped founder, there will always be necessary work that has to be done to open up space for you to work on your most impactful work.

When you work full-time at a company, they usually have systems in-place to support you, and ensure that the roadway stays clear so you can swim in the bliss of working deep without distraction.

But that shit does not happen when you’re the founder. Nobody is there to protect you. Those plates have to be spun by you instead, and even if you outsource – you still have to manage those people instead of the tasks. That makes it a lot harder to find time to do your work, because it’s no longer simply given to you, it’s now something you have to earn.

This post is all about my key rules of productivity that I use to help me stay on-track, and ensure that I’m able to consistently keep myself moving, while controlling burnout, and ensuring that I find time to do everything, or at the very least, make it abundantly clear that I don’t have enough time for it all, and need to make some decisions.

Prioritize Consistently

When people prioritize tasks, they often just go on “vibes”. It’s more about how important it feels to them in that moment without any regard or structure on how to determine what tasks are what priority.

The first thing you have to do is understand how to prioritize your tasks consistently.

Scope your priorities to the day. I’m usually setting up a loose schedule each week and adapt each day as the week progresses. I often shift priorities around, move tasks as-needed.

In order to do that effectively you have to understand the rules, and respect them.

Only One Task Can Be Priority One

If everything is your top priority, nothing is your top priority. I don’t care how busy you are, or what your workload looks like, that reality is always true.

If you cram a bunch of stuff into priority 1 every day, you’re going to burn yourself out, break habits, and make mistakes, while sacrificing your health in the process. All while still not going to get it all done.

Look at everything you want to get done that day, and pick the one that is most important. That’s your priority one. Everything else either needs to be priority one for another day, or you need to drop its priority to a priority 3 or 4.

For me, priority one is the “big hairy problem I need to solve”. It represents the single biggest challenge that will require the most effort from me on that day.

Habits Are Exclusively Priority Two

Habits are the most important thing you can do to make yourself more-effective. If you want to be more productive, you must be a master of habits. And habits only work if you do them consistently.

The problem is, they’re the first thing to go when we get busy, simply because the consequence of not doing them is never felt immediately. This means we must stand up for these tasks ourselves, because if we don’t, the system is going to automatically push them away.

To solve this, I only put recurring habits that I’m developing in priority 2. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE is allowed there.

If you’re following the “only 1 task can be the top priority” rule, and you’re honest about your workload, then you’ll work on the priority 1 task, and then go into your habits right afterward This protects your habits, and helps to determine how many habits you can realistically fulfill in the time you have available to you.

Once a week, I review last week’s habits. If I was consistently unable to get through my work list, I’ll review my habits, and either decrease the frequency of some of them, simplify them, or postpone them if I determine it’s not aligned with my needs.

Lower Priorities

All other tasks slot into place from the above two rules. Basically every other “important” thing that you want to work on gets organized between priority 3 and priority 4.

I usually put tasks that I should get done in Priority 3, and everything else is priority 4.

Sometimes today’s priority 3 is tomorrow’s priority 1, but since I already chose my top priority, and my habits are all priority 2, that means that I can work on my priority 3 items after I get my habits done.

Capture Now, Decide In Batches

For your system to work, you must be able to fully trust that it has everything you need to do in it. That means that you’ve gotta really commit to putting everything in it.

And action items are going to come at you from all over the place. messages, phone calls, random thoughts, content…I could go on forever. These items rarely come to you as a direct next action. Usually, what you have to do is obscured. You’ll receive statements and facts, not actions.

For example, if you get a notification that says “Your taxes are due”, that needs to be added to your task system, but how? “Your taxes are due” isn’t exactly an action you need to do, it’s just a fact. A horrifying, never-ending fact.

So when you add it to your system, you have to think about it a bit. What are the next actions? When are you going to do this? How are you going to ensure it happens?

That’s a process. It requires some organization, and thinking on what the actual action item(s) are for something.

If every time something like this comes to you, you forced yourself to think about all of those decisions in that moment, you’d never get anything done. You’ll just be on a hamster wheel, hoovering up all of the input, making decision after decision, and never actually doing any action.

How does one avoid this plight? Batch it!

When a thing comes in that you know you need to do something with, grab it, and quickly plop it into your inbox of things you need to organize. Then, on a consistent cadence (I do it daily as a P2 habit!), get your inbox to zero by organizing everything in-batch at one time. this usually takes between 15-30 minutes to do.

Organize Tasks By Context

Tasks should be organized by the contexts you will need to find them in. Most systems allow you to leverage tagging or labels, and with well-thought out tags, you can effectively filter out which tasks you need to see, when you need to see them.

Key things that I find to be most useful include:

1. Who’s involved in the task (I have labels for every person I work with regularly)
2. The status of the task (is it blocked, in progress)
3. Where this task needs done (grocery store, office)
4. The task type (chore, project, code, email, message, etc)
5. Capacity Requirement (more on this later)

There’s so many situations where these filter types are helpful.

• While running errands you think “I’m in town right now, what else did I need to do?” – A quick look at errand tasks associated with your local town quickly reveals 3 other things you could do while you’re in town.
• Ahead of a 1:1 with an employee, you can review their label and surface key talking points quickly.
• Maybe your priority 2 habit is to progress blocked tasks, so you review the blocked tag and push everything along.

The list could go on forever. The point is, labels and tags are going to be your lifeline if you’re using this system effectively. Understand what you need, and make sure you can filter to get the exact results you’re looking for.

These contexts differ for everyone, and how you organize them is entirely up to you. For example, I also use time budgeting with timers in my day-to-day to help me keep track of how much work I’m doing vs how much non-work I’m doing. This, combined with my rules of productivity, have truly changed my life.

In my specific task management system, I also have a way to specify which timeblock a task is intended to be done in. This allows me to filter away tasks that I shouldn’t be thinking about when the “work” timer is ticking vs the “leisure” or “buffer” timer.

Budget Using Capacity Requirements

The goal of my system is to tell me what I can work on in any given moment. I have a natural rhythm in my routine of highs and lows in-terms of energy levels. Everyone does, really. This is why it’s so important to add work as “deep” or “shallow” work in your system. This allows you to look at a list of tasks, and be honest on which ones you can fit in a single day.

I’m tired by 2PM most days, and if you want me to knock out a deep work task at that time, it’s not going to be my best work. But I absolutely can do a myriad of shallow, quick win, tasks that are equally important and make sure my desk remains clear when I’m ready to bring home the bacon and do the big difficult things.

So when I look at what I’m going to get done in a day, I’m already thinking about this push and pull in my day. I know that I can realistically work on 1, maybe 2 deep tasks in a day, and will only really have room for shallow things in the afternoon. No matter how busy I am, I can’t change my energy levels, and pretending I can is a one-way trip to burnout.

If you budget realistically with these filters, you can set yourself up for success, and do better at setting clear expectations for those who work with you.

Use Surfacing to Prune Desire Paths

Often times, good ideas come at bad times, and sometimes they need to be re-surfaced at the right time, or determined if it’s a good idea or not when there’s more context. A well-built system not only provides you with a place to capture these insights as they come to you, but is also designed to resurface them at regular intervals.

So, when such ideas come to me, I put them in my inbox, and later decide when I want to review that idea. I set a date and have it re-surface on that date, when I may have different context and more knowledge that can inform my opinion of that idea. It will likely stir in my subconscious in the meantime, and obviously events will also happen during that time, as well.

When the idea re-surfaces, I either push it to a later date (perhaps I’m still not ready yet), or I determine it’s not worth keeping the idea in my system, and I remove it altogether. Often times, I’ll even look at it and realize that I got there in a different way, and can delete the item altogether.

Sometimes, however, the context will hit at a moment when I’m in striking distance of that idea being something that should be executed on, and it allows me to make small adjustments to my plan to implement that idea.

This capturing mechanism has ensured that fewer of my days randomly get consumed by a sudden burst of inspiration on an unrelated idea (which in some contexts can be called “procrastination” 😄). This takes away my inner justification that this has to happen right now or else I’ll forget the idea to the tides of the future. This alone has had a profound impact on my ability to focus.

Integrate External Systems By Reference, Not Duplication

Your system is your system. It’s not your business’s system, it’s not your employer’s system. It’s yours. No matter your working situation, you’re going to have other places where you have tasks that you’ll need to do.

• Product teams have ALM solutions like Jira, or ClickUp
• Sales teams have CRM solutions like Pipedrive, or Salesforce
• Support teams have CSM solutions like Crisp, or HelpScout

These are not your system. Your system belongs to you, and you alone. A part of your job is likely managing these systems and using them to collaborate with others, but what I’m talking about is personal productivity, and that simply will not mix with the way these other systems will organize tasks.

There will be tasks that you need to do within these systems, and that’s fine. Leave them there, and elevate the actions into your task system. This does not mean duplicate these tasks 1:1 in your system!

Instead, you just need to add what you need to prompt you to go look in that system. Some tasks might be something like “work on that Jira ticket”, but usually you can get what you need from something that’s even more broad, like “complete all of today’s Pipedrive tasks”.

The needs for each system and how much of it goes into your personal task management system varies, but the purpose of your system is to elevate the things you need to do, and if there’s a better system in-place to specifically describe what that means, all your system needs to do is remind you to go use that system.

Anything beyond that is just busy-work and you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to mix oil and water.

Getting Started

To get started with a system like this, I recommend that you start by following Getting Things Done’s approach and do a Mind Sweep. It usually takes 1-3 dedicated days to really get everything out of your head and get the initial system set-up. You’ll make up that time in productivity. It’s worth it.

Getting Things Done

The thing I love about the GTD methodology is that the book very specifically does not dictate how you organize your life. It provides the key constructs and the framework, but doesn’t necessarily adhere to any type of software. In-fact, it spends a fair bit of time just talking about how you can manage this entire system using a drawer of folders and files.

In-general, I would recommend reading Getting Things Done in its entirety.

Todoist

If you’re looking for a tool to use to do this, I use Todoist, and have for over a decade. It’s like it’s tailor-made for this approach. I extensively utilize its labeling to organize everything I have and then to surface them on the correct lists based on queries. It has an inbox, and integrates with everything so I’m able to reliably add stuff to my inbox quickly.

Here’s why Todoist is so great at this:

1. It has amazing filtering capabilities for tasks.
2. It understands that due dates are not the same as the date to surface a task on my list of things to do today.
3. It has an inbox, where you can dump tasks to get them out of your head.
4. Works great on mobile, desktop, and supports voice commands.

Conclusion

As you get more-busy, you’re going to find that by having this stuff in one place, it’s a hell of a lot easier to start identifying patterns. This visibility enables you to begin seeing what you can outsource, and also what kind of expertise you would benefit the most from outsourcing as you grow. Just that alone to me is a great reason to do it.

The biggest benefit I’ve observed is better habit forming. It’s so easy to let those slip, but when you are brutally honest, you will find that the routine and habits fall into place.

This knowledge is based on years of high-functioning task management that has enabled me to work more effectively, honor my time budgets, protect myself from burnout, and also make sure that I am getting everything done.

It’s genuinely one of those things that will improve your life in pretty much every area as long as you fully commit to it.