Fridays are for deep thinking.
What we think, is what we become.
It's easy to spend all week not even thinking for a few minutes. As a founder, you have so many things to do, and finding time for sitting down and thinking deeply might sound like a "nice to have."
But founders need to carve out at least a few hours a week to think deeply about the long-term. How do we grow as a company? Are we on the right track? Is this the best way to use our limited time and resource? Is there a culture we want to build? What's our vision for this product? Are we using the right copy to sell it? Who's our ideal customer?
None of these questions can be answered in a heartbeat. You need to sit down and think deeply about questions like these.
Building a startup is a day-to-day firefighting job, so founders need to be more deliberate about carving some time out throughout the week. For me, I learned that I could reserve a half-day per week to sit down and quietly examine the current situation, our team, and the direction of our company. This is Friday mornings for me, but any day could work for you.
This might seem as if I am merely procrastinating, but there is such a thing as productive procrastination. It's called critical thinking. Clear your mind, clear your schedule, and clear your to-do list for the day to focus on the long-term vision.
On Friday mornings, I do nothing. I sit there, think, and scribble down rough ideas or take a long walk. But for this to really work, for this to give me the time and space to think deeply, I need to be free of "attention grabbers."
Common attention grabbers are emails, Slack messages, Asana comments, etc. Once I let them in, they clutter my cognitive load, making me unable to go back to deep thinking.
I don't even open my laptop, look at my phone during Friday mornings. It's the time where I'm free of screen time. It helps me to think clearly.
So, once you decided to spend a chunk of time thinking, don't touch any of the attention grabbers. Don't let them into your mind. Find a system to batch them all at once later, and put them out of sight.
We're building Hyperinbox for this cause: To let people find more time thinking. It was designed to batch notifications coming from various tools and applications. It provides more space to focus on deep topics.
Last Friday, I spent time thinking about our brand. How might we design our core message, and how should we tell our story? I am excited to share what I shaped with our team next week.
If you are interested in Hyperinbox, sign up for our waitlist here. We're currently looking for private beta testers.
