There are a million things you could do right now. There is also an overwhelming amount of information on how to do those things.
If you don’t plan how you spend your time, your time will be allocated to the next shiny thing to grab your attention. Your days will be filled with busywork.
It’s your job to identify the one thing that is most likely to move the needle, the one thing that you could work on today that will move you the closest to your goal.
Often, this means working on a task outside of your comfort zone that you do not have an answer for. This is scary, which is why you have been occupying yourself with emails, website tweaks and courses. Interviewing customers, cold outreach and understanding unit economics aren’t fun - they require you to confront harsh truths about yourself and your business - but they are the things that will shortcut your route to making money.
When you have worked out the most important thing to work on (or as Matt Mochary calls it, the ‘Top Goal’), schedule two hours each day to work on it. Two hours doesn’t feel like much, but this is remarkably hard to do. You must resist the urge to work on ‘urgent’ but unimportant tasks during those two hours. In the moment, everything feels urgent, but they very rarely are.
Plan how you will spend the rest of your week ahead of time. Schedule every working period of your day. If anything, this will leave you with more time for yourself, not less.
When you have periods of work without meetings, practise deep work. Put simply, the technology around you is designed to be addictive. Keep them out of sight and work uninterrupted on a single task for a short period of time. You will make more progress in less time.
Conduct a calendar audit to review how you spent your time at the end of your week. The goal is to keep iterating until you design a schedule that leverages your energy levels, optimises for deep work and allows you to do the things that make you happy.
Finally, working by yourself gives you a lot of time to think. Once in a while, one of those thoughts will feel mind-blowing - a new business idea, a dramatic shift in the way you are working, an urgent task to do. Develop an easy system to capture those thoughts but don’t let them steer you off course. The best ideas still feel mind-blowing, even after the novelty has worn off.