How I manage my todos as a CEO
Kanban board with five columns: Inbox, Backlog, Blocked, Delegated, Done
GTD-style “if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it immediately.”
Create todos for everything (and I mean, everything) that go into Inbox. Every morning sit down with my CoS, prioritize todos that are in the Inbox into the Backlog. (and reprioritize existing Backlog list if it’s changed)
Whenever I’m not in a meeting, open todo list and do top Backlog item.
Strongly believe in inbox zero with todos. Had an internally public todo list in Notion and used to respond to slack messages with “On my todo list to review: “.
Then would prioritize replying within all my other priorities so that incoming messages/emails that require more than 2 mins of action cannot override other priorities and I don’t get bogged down in the day to day accidentally.
Other notes about Personal Growth and/or Company Building
- 🌿How to be better at making decisions
What can I do before, during, and after making decisions to be better at making them?
- 🌿Developer tools startups are playing on hard mode
How do you build a business selling tools to people who can technically build anything you can?
- 🌿How to have great taste
Taste is what differentiates the good from the great. So, how can I have better taste? This is my ongoing log of what I have learned.
- 🌿How I tend to my digital garden
My quests with this digital garden are to publish more and to have fun. Let's explore why I even have a digital garden and how it's going.
- 🌲1:1s are for personal connection, not project updates
My 1:1s are unusual. Here's why.
- 🌲Being unreasonably responsive has made my projects more successful
Creators who respond to feedback quickly unlock two virtuous cycles that allow them to build better solutions more quickly.
- 🌱How to ship faster
Humans have the ability to get ambitious things done ridiculously fast. How can I get more things done quickly?
- 🌱How do you invent the future?
Innovation happens by combining things we can see and touch today in novel ways. So how can we have more things to see and touch?
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- 🌿How we foster deeper connections in our remote team
I believe that teams that are more connected perform better and that remote teams have worse connections. How can we improve that?
- 🌿How we make brainstorming work
Brainstorming usually fails. But, I noticed a pattern in the times that it worked exceptionally well. Here's how to make it work.
- 🔗David Cain: Do Quests, Not Goals
I love this reframing from "goal" to "quest": "goals" feel like pressure, "quests" feel like excitement and adventure!
- 🌲Why I'm vigorous about giving feedback
Every day, you will find me hunting down a founder's email to send them feedback about my experience with their product. Why?