Things That Look Like Work

My dorm room was never as clean as it was during finals week. Even though I had an 8am Chemistry final, somehow I’d find a way to justify that something else was more important. Often I concluded that reorganizing my CD collection was the best way to spend the evening.

Photo by Moshe Schneider on Unsplash

We are all masters at avoiding real work, in a work of alchemy we transform the unimportant into our highest priority. We procrastinate in both our personal life and at work — it’s the human condition.

Most of us are in the business of ‘busy-ness’. Meetings, alignment, roadmaps, backlogs, product reviews, and on and on. Of course, there are times for these and they are valuable when coordination rules the day, but not on the early meandering journey to find market fit.

For that reason, I’m suggesting that early on, we keep a close eye on the socially acceptable work — it’s dangerous. The acceptable has a gravity and allure all its own — easily consuming precious days — metaphorically pushing our peas around the plate, but never actually eating our veggies.

“At the earliest stage the most common startup failure is obvious. Startups die when they never launch anything. They do a bunch of things that look like work and then just quietly disappear. “ — Garry Tan

Avoid the appearance of work and get to it. So you may be wondering, what’s the real work? Good question. It’s what will get you closer finding and delivering what your customer wants. You won’t find the answer in your excel spreadsheet or comfy office chair.

Get out there, share your work with users, listen to them, and work like hell to make the product something they can’t live without. At the early stages, pretty much everything else is procrastination dressed in work clothes.

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