Team Productivity vs Founder Productivity

I’ve worked as part of teams, lead teams, recruited for teams before. But none of those prepared me for the journey of building and managing a team for my own company.

As the DelightChat tribe grows and works more cohesively as a team, Sankalp and I faced a mounting problem.

Our personal productivity was increasingly taking a toll as we spent more of our time enabling the team. We would feel bad towards the end of the day as we didn’t get the work we had planned to do, done.

Initially, we thought the appropriate response was to aggressively block our time during the day so that we can get our work done. But despite our efforts, we would always find ourselves helping our team (and of course we would do that) whenever required.

That’s when the realisation dawned on us - our personal productivity as founders is 2nd priority as compared to the productivity of our team. It is a given that we are enablers and we will be playing that role even more as the team expands and our company grows.

Once we accepted this new reality, we made one simple change so that while we enable our team, we still get our work done.

Sankalp and I started waking up early in the morning (between 6.30-7.30am) which enables us to put 3 odd hours into personal productivity. The work that requires flow state or hours of distraction-free time gets done during those morning hours.

The new routine ensures that Sankalp and I get our important work done, as well as be available during the day to unblock team members as and when required.

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