Increase your Productivity for 2025: Systems and Tactics

We want you to 🚀 in 2025! Time optimization is the foundation to success.

Every January for the past 30 years I leverage the new year vibes to think about how I can further optimize my time. In this post, I want to share some of my personal motivators, strategies and tactics/tools that I use to ruthlessly optimize my time.

I’ve never liked the phrase ‘Time Management’ instead I prefer thinking of it as time optimization. To me this highlights the finite and always decreasing element of time. Like you, I fundamentally know that it’s a very precious asset worth thinking about, but to start off my process of reviewing my time optimization strategy for a new year, I find it helpful to start with a powerful reminder of why this is important.

Motivation: The ‘Why’ of Time Optimization

Part of the human condition is our limited time, so there’s a lot of material to work with here. I’ve been at this process for decades and here’s my three top motivators. Note: I specifically pick these because they hit me pretty hard and force me to really think about this not only early in Jan, but throughout the year. For me they are tremendously motivating:

1. Tail end - There’s a blog called ‘Wait but why’ where the author cleverly uses very simply drawings to get complex topics across or use them to pack a punch. In 2015 he put out a post called ‘The Tail End’ that generated a lot of buzz, so I checked it out. It really walloped me and hit me so hard, that I re-read it every year as part of my New Year’s Time Optimization cycle. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing (here), it’s a fast read and I can’t TL;DR it as it’s all too good.

2. Randy Pausch’s Time Management Talk - if that name sounds familiar, he is the Last Lecture guy. After that talk, he gave THIS talk at UVA.

3. Time Billionaire - I’ve seen this attributed to 2-3 originators, but here’s a good concise explanation from Anthony Pompliano (POMP!):

Hopefully all or at least one of those have you VERY motivated to think about optimizing time, now let’s dig into some strategies.

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Strategy: Compounding

As mentioned, I’ve been doing this annual routine for quite a while. Similar to financial compounding where you learn that magically a 10% y/y growth rate results in doubling every 7 years and not 10; if you get started on small time optimizations when you are in your twenties, and get a 10% improvement, after 7yrs you have a double. But it doesn’t stop there, you are now on a exponential curve. Thirty years out and your productivity has produced the ability to handle a freakishly large amount of tasks extremely efficiently. In those thirty years you have built a business person super power!

Strategy: Systems Over Goals

Another strategy that I’ve found very helpful was coined by Dilbert creator Scott Adams and is simply: Systems over goals.

Goals feel good, they have a number and you should definitely have goals. But from an engineering perspective goals are backwards - they are the output - what’s the input? The input is the system, get the system right and the goals become easier. A good system will have daily/weekly/monthly habits that together, start you compounding and not only achieving your goals, but blasting through them. Want to learn more? OG book here, and video here. James Claar has polished this up and enhanced it, for example here.

Strategy: ‘AND’s rule, ‘OR’s drool…

You’ve probably heard the phrase “you can work harder or you can work smarter”. I reject that framing. Why can’t you do both? Many times in startups, problems or choices are framed in binaries (this or that). Whenever I’m presented with that framework, my ‘system’ is I first spend time thinking about how to ‘break the binary’ -80% of the time I find it’s a false binary, you can find a third choice or sometimes you can figure out how to flip it into an AND and do both.

A classic is the old adage: You can either work harder or smarter. But what if you did both? What if you worked 5% harder AND 15% smarter. Here you are compounding again. This isn’t 20% it’s .15 + (1.15 *.05) = 20.7% - not a big deal right? Wrong, you are now compounding the compounding.

You can’t make more time, but what about the times you aren’t working? What if you turn that into work? No I’m not talking about family time or sleep, i’m talking about your work hours.

Start by working harder (in the time blocked)

To break the binary, I always start by first figuring out how to get 10% more out a week - that’s 4 hrs or 48 mins/day. Think about your motivators. Every thing on your calendar has to fight for survival. Some of the things I chop out: meetings - I could write a lot on this, instead I’ll send you to DHH’s excellent book here. Long lunches, time wasted on low priority items. If you work at it you can easily find 48 mins/day to be more productive.

What’s your pie chart?

A helpful exercise I’ve used with founders to help them think through this is to draw a pie chart of your time and where you think you should be spending it. You should have customers, strategy, product, thinking time, meetings and management/team building on there. Allocate the 100%. Now look back in time where are you? I guarantee you the biggest missmatch is meetings and the other side (you aren’t spending enough time) is strategy and management/team.

Last thought: If you feel like when you take a long trip, your productivity is up 100x, you are in too many meetings. Shorten them, make weeklies monthlies, don’t be afraid to say - ok we are done 42mins into a 60 (most people stretch to hit the 6). those are 18 mins you are never getting back and a good chunk towards your 45!

Eisenhower Matrix

It’s easy to get stuck in email/slack/text ping pong hell. Emails, slacks and text are like the mythical Hydra:

You answer an email, two more come in. Create a system where you triage emails and lower your response rate. The Eisenhower Matrix (mentioned in the Randy Pausch video) is a great framework for email as well as tasks:

It’s easy for all email to feel green, but it rarely is. My green box is: customer 911, team member 911, shareholder/investor 911, then it goes down fast from there. This gives me time to move on to the important stuff or pause there and do other tasks in the green - each individual email, not “email” is a task. Stop after the greens and move on to a green aspect of a strategic project.

Be ruthless with your time, it’s your most valuable asset.

Now let’s move onto some of my favorite tactics and tools.