# You're Working on the WRONG Things - here's how to fix it

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td-6EhAkLXc
Duration: 9 min
Language: English
Words: 1824
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Td-6EhAkLXc

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[0:00] You're working on the wrong things. Whether you're working full-time on your startup or squeezing in 10 hours on nights and weekends, I bet 70% of what you're doing shouldn't be done by you. But you feel productive, right? You committed 317 lines of code, answered 28 customer emails, [music] posted eight times on social media. You're busy. But busy doesn't mean effective. That's why so many founders feel overwhelmed. I've written five books, invested in more than 220 startups, and built six companies of my own. And I get asked all

[0:33] the time, "How do you get so much done?" The answer isn't that I work more hours than you. It's that I stopped working on the wrong things years ago. You're probably doing the same thing I used to do. You're great at coding, so you code all day. You're good at design, so you tweak pixels for hours. You enjoy customer support because people thank you. But here's what's wild. The things you're best at, the things you're most comfortable doing, they are most likely the wrong things for you to be working on right now. So, how do you know if

[1:02] you're working on the right thing? What's it costing you when you get it wrong? And how can you stop wasting your effort starting today? It starts with my certainty versus uncertainty framework. Here's how it works. You should focus on work where the outcome is uncertain. You should delegate work where the outcome is certain. In other words, turn unknowns into known. Once something has a well- definfined, repeatable outcome, get it off your plate. Anything that has a well- definfined certain outcome should be delegated. Obviously, there are a few caveats. And I know you might

[1:36] be thinking, Rob, I'm just starting out. I can't afford to hire anyone. And we'll address that in a minute. But first, let me show you what this looks like in practice. Here are a few examples of uncertain work. This is work that you should be working on. the right tasks. These include customer development calls, talking to customers to understand their needs, figuring out

[1:57] your positioning and your messaging. It's complicated, it's messy, it's muddy, and it requires founder level decision-making, testing new marketing channels, product road maps, finding product market fit, experiments. These are things that are uncertain and are very, very hard, if not impossible, to hire people to do as well as you can. Now, let's look at some work that is certain. So these are tasks you should not be working on. Customer support is a good example. So in the very early days doing support as a founder is probably a good idea. Maybe you do support for 3 to 6 months. Maybe you do it up until the

[2:32] point that you have 50 or 100 customers. I'm actually going to talk a little more about this in my caveats a little later in the video. Other work that you probably shouldn't be doing is social media posting. Once you have templates and processes, admin tasks, coding features that are already speced out, email management, data entry. Did you notice the pattern? The uncertain work involves discovery and complexity and muddiness and decisionmaking. You're figuring something out. The certain work involves execution. You already know how it should be done. Now, this framework goes even deeper than what we can cover in one video. And if you want to hear

[3:09] how it applies to your personal life, not just your startup, check out episode 720 of my podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us, with Craig Huitt, we'll link it up in the description. And I hope you'll subscribe in Apple Podcast, Spotify, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, one thing to note is that uncertain work usually becomes certain work over time. When I started my podcast 15 years ago, I didn't know how to write show notes. Show notes were completely uncertain. What format should we use? What should I include? How detailed should the notes be? I actually shared the editing duties myself and wrote all the show notes for early

[3:43] episodes of Startups with the rest of us until we figured it out. And then once we found a pattern, it became certain work. I created a template. I handed it to my team and I moved on to new uncertain work. Your job as a founder is to find things to focus on that are uncertain and move them to certain through repetition and learning how it should be done and then putting a process in place to delegate that work and go find new uncertain work. This is how you grow is by firing yourself from one job at a time. As that job becomes more of a certainty, like customer

[4:23] support, like responding to emails and admin tasks, you figure out how to fire yourself from that job and move on to the riskier and more uncertain parts of your business. With all this in mind, I want to give a couple caveats. Early customer support, as I mentioned above, maybe for the first 50 or 100 customers, you should probably be handling it so you can learn the patterns. If you have a higher priced product, maybe it's only customer success for the first three to five customers and then you hire someone to help. Another caveat is if you literally can't afford a couple hundred a month to hire a VA, then yeah, you

[4:57] probably need to do it yourself for now. But make it your goal to delegate as soon as possible. Don't make it your permanent state to keep working on certain tasks. And just because you outsource something certain you delegate it, doesn't mean you should stop paying attention to it. If you hire someone to handle customer support, it doesn't mean you should never look at it again. You want to be monitoring what they're sending out. You want to be aware of the issues that keep coming up so that you can adapt or evolve the product and your processes. I can imagine you might be thinking, Rob, I'm bootstrapping. I

[5:27] can't afford to hire anyone. So, let me reframe that for you. If you have 12 hours of nights and weekend time and you're spending 4 hours a week on customer support, that is 33% of your available hours. you can get back a tremendous percentage of your time if you put in the work to find someone to help you with support. Another objection

[5:47] is nobody can do this as good as me. Usually, it's a developer saying nobody can code as good as I can. And you know what? You're probably right. They probably can't. But here's the thing. You're not delegating your best coding work. You're delegating the feature that's already speced out where the decisions are already made. You know what needs to happen. Someone else can execute on it. Save your coding genius for the uncertain work, architecture decisions, what to build, the tricky problems, the features that you're not sure how to build yet. And as long as you keep your finger on code quality, you can get so much more done once

[6:22] you're able and willing to delegate it. Another objection I hear is, "It would take me too long to train someone." Training someone to answer common customer emails with a good FAQ and examples takes a few hours. you record a a screencast, you can have AI mine your past responses and create a knowledge base. And if you have someone who is solid, it's a one-time investment to get

[6:43] back what, 3, 5, 10 hours every week. So, would you spend a handful of hours once to get back 40 plus hours a month? Of course. And if you can't document the work well enough to train someone, it's probably a sign you don't understand it well enough yourself. Training forces clarity. And the last objection I often hear is, "I tried delegating before and it didn't work." So, I want you to ask yourself if you were delegating uncertain work or if you hadn't provided enough context and oversight. Delegation is not abdication. It doesn't mean, "I'm going to hire this person and they're going to figure it out." It's probably

[7:15] not going to work well for you. You need to train them and you need to delegate certain work. If you hand someone a task and say, "Figure out our pricing strategy," it's probably not going to work, right? Cuz it's uncertain. It's founder level work. But if you say, "Here's our pricing. Here are the edge

[7:28] cases. Here's how to handle refunds. That's work that is more certain. This framework only works if you've done the uncertain work first to templatize it and to document it and to hand it off to someone who can do it repeatably. It's really easy to watch a video like this and not take any action. Often times it feels easy to hide in the certain work because it's so comfortable, right? It feels productive and it feels like you're checking things off the to-do list and getting things done. But productive and effective aren't the same. So, here's what I want you to do right now. Open your calendar. Go

[7:59] through last week hour by hour. For each block of time, ask, "Was the outcome of this work uncertain?" Mark it with an R for right work or a W for wrong work. And I bet 50, 60, 70% gets marked with a W. Now, pick just one W and figure out what it would actually cost delegated, not what you imagine. Go to Upwork and look at real rates. I bet it's a few hundred a month for someone who could do this pretty well. Then ask yourself, is that investment worth getting 10, 20, 40 hours or more back every month to work on things that could actually 10x your

[8:34] business? If you do this exercise, you'll start working on the right things next week instead of next year. And if you're looking for more info and a solid how-to book on this topic, you should check out Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time. Working on the right things and delegating tasks that are certain has been one of the biggest needle movers for myself on my entrepreneurial journey. One of the areas that a lot of earlystage founders waste a lot of time on is trying to build an audience. And I don't think that's something you should delegate. In fact, I don't think it's something you should do at all. To get

[9:03] all the reasons why you should go check out this next video, make sure you like and subscribe to this video. And we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.

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