How to Prioritize Your Time
From Y Combinator
Adora Cheung's framework for spending your hours on what actually moves the business — and ruthlessly cutting what doesn't.
What this video covers
Adora Cheung outlines a framework for startup founders to audit and prioritize their working hours around moving a primary metric (revenue or active users). She advises cutting vanity activities like conferences and networking, grading tasks weekly on expected impact and complexity, and structuring deep work to minimize context switching. While designed for early-stage software startups, the exercise of logging hourly tasks and evaluating impact versus effort transfers directly to any small business operator.
Best for: Founders and solo operators struggling with distraction; Early-stage businesses trying to achieve initial growth; Teams experiencing high context switching between sales and technical work; Not applicable to operational teams with fixed shift-based responsibilities
Chapters
Key points
- 02:57 For early-stage startups, the primary KPI is almost always revenue or active users.
- 03:12 The highest-leverage startup activities are exclusively talking to users and building the product.
- 03:31 Activities such as winning awards, attending conferences, networking events, and PR are usually fake progress.
- 09:00 Technical founders frequently make the mistake of building features before speaking to users.
- 09:55 An easy task can be completed in less than one day, a medium task takes 1 to 2 days, and a hard task takes multiple days.
- 15:40 A person who chooses the wrong task quickly, learns, and course-corrects outperforms someone paralyzed by indecision.
Turn it into a project: Implement Impact-Driven Weekly Time Prioritization
Establish a weekly operating cadence to filter out fake progress, rank upcoming tasks by impact and effort, and protect focused working time to hit core business metrics.
Phase 1: Establish Task Pipeline and Scoring
- 03:04 Establish a weekly target for either revenue or active users
- 06:00 Create a central spreadsheet to capture incoming ideas without immediately acting on them
- 07:02 Score backlog items by projected impact on the weekly target (High, Medium, Low)
- 09:50 Score backlog items by completion time (Easy: <1 day, Medium: 1-2 days, Hard: multi-day)
- 10:32 Select top High/Easy and High/Medium tasks and remove Low/Hard items from the sprint
Phase 2: Audit Current Time Usage
- 05:01 Log every hour worked across the previous week and classify whether each hour contributed to the primary KPI
Phase 3: Weekly Review and Retrospective
- 11:53 Write a weekly update recording actual KPI vs. goal, biggest obstacle, completed tasks, and learnings
- 12:28 Review cumulative updates to detect repeated growth bottlenecks or low-value task creep
Phase 4: Execution and Calendar Structuring
- 14:18 Group tasks into dedicated full or half-day blocks for building versus customer outreach to minimize switching costs
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Summary, chapters and plan written by Bizer from the video, not by Y Combinator.
