Don't Kill Your Startup With 1,000 Trivial Tasks
onstartups.com
onstartups.com
At which dude says: No, you're doing it wrong here is what you should do: outsource all that menial work and do "meaningful" stuff.
Anybody ventures to guess how much the dude was making per day? That's what I would REALLY like to know.
Minimum the low millions per year. I think I read Appsumo (the dude's business) had 150000 members last year. They sell software or services to businesses/geeks.
Also, one thing that I think is missing here is that the human capacity for high-caliber "knowledge work" is far from infinite. Most of the best folks I've met can only cram maybe a handful of hours of legitimately productive knowledge work into a single day. A good way to buffer those few hours of work is to spend additional hours doing low-stress busy work. Like data entry. If you change that to attempting to cram more stressful work topped off with new employee management tasks into that time period then in the worst case scenario you could tip the scales into driving someone to burn-out.
Edit: The point I'm trying to get at is that the idea of a simple tradeoff between spending time on a "trivial" activity competing with time spent on a more meaningful activity is extraordinarily naive. Just because you free up time by avoiding one activity doesn't mean it's possible to fill in all that time with another activity, since sometimes there are limits. Also, sometimes seemingly trivial activities serve important roles. If one didn't know any better it would be easy to look at an average person's schedule and desire to reallocate all of the time spent on sleep and eating to productive work. However, for those cases we know better. But for other more complex cases we don't know better.
If we had an objective model for optimally scheduling the time of someone who makes more than a dollar a second, then a lot more people would be making that much money.
But we don't. It's not objective, it's subjective. And trying to force a one in a million creative knowledge worker into a 19th century factory worker mindset seems like the surest way to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Naturally once you have recurring tasks, it makes sense to consider outsourcing, but your average founder is earning zero so his premise is doubly flawed.
But I don't think you can expect everyone who runs a business to adopt this mindset.
The title can definitely be better – something along the line of min/maxing your time/profit, instead of 'killing' companies or 'trivial' tasks.
Exactly. In Hackers and Painters [1] pg suggests "saving up" software bugs, because "it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is". I think this transfers pretty well to things like tech support in relation to running a startup, in that menial tasks are quickly rewarding and keep you in the "zone".