Entrepreneur’s First Day: How To Allocate Your Attention

Attention is the Most Valuable Asset

Each person governs their attention with varying degrees of scrutiny. I am of the current belief that I would rather have a high level of scrutiny on where I devote my attention, because I believe the goals I aspire towards require a high degree of continuous scrutiny. Expertise is accumulated via the persistent channeling of attention to a concept over long a period of time.

I define attention as the complex relationships between the following:

… attention is complex and this list only scratches the surface of its complexities.

My Organization: 5 Departments

My current organization is split into five key departments, each crucial to building my business:

1. Administrative
   • Legal & General Counsel
   • Procurement
   • Real Estate & Facilities
2. Finance
   • Accounting
   • Financial Planning & Analysis
   • Taxation
3. Personal
   • Continuous Education
   • Family
   • Leisure
4. Product & Technology
   • Second Hand Industry
   • Life Management
   • Insights & Analytics
5. Sales & Marketing
   • Brand
   • Flywheel

---

Before going further, let’s step back and define what I mean by the concepts of organization, department, and division.

Organization

According to Cambridge Dictionary, a organization is a group of people who work together in an organized way for a shared purpose.

Unfortunately I can’t afford to pay people yet, and must play all of the roles myself; customer service, accountant, developer, sales, marketing, etc. It’s not like these roles can be ignored – taxes must be paid, cash flow must be tracked, outbound must generate leads, and so on.

Departments

Departments are categorizations of the roles that must be tended to. Attention is even influenced by the “time of year”.

The attention towards taxes during tax season is much different than handling taxes throughout the year. Having continuous visibility into all of the departments that keep the business healthy enables you to ask the right question and address the blockers more strategically. Having a view of your organization and its departments also enables you to identify missing components when you feel like you have hit a wall (a.k.a. skill gap / missing priority / etc.).

Divisions

Divisions help fill in the blanks of the responsibilities that each department must uphold.

When it seems like two departments share similar divisions, it may be a sign to address a gap in your organization. If a department starts to feel too large, you can split the department and the divisions contained within the department. These decisions enable you to think more about the attention that must be allocated at very scopes of the business.

Allocatable Hours per Week

It helps to first acknowledge the number of hours you have available to you over a given cadence. Let’s use a week as the cadence – there are 168 hours in a week. I am in bed for 6 hours 54 minutes on a 6 month average according to my creepy iPhone Health app. So let’s call it 7 hours of sleep per day.

After painfully losing 49 hours to the needful each week (I wish I could be awake all the time) that leaves me with 119 hours of making magic happen.

Sometimes, it might make more sense to use a different cadence for time allocation (e.g. allocating time for divisions within departments). For the same of this article, we will focus on a week.

Allocating Hours Per Department Per Week

It’s simple once you have defined your organization, departments, divisions, and number of hours to allocate. you have a budget of hours to spend on each department and you must allocate a percentage of time to enhancing each department. Here are my allocations that I am starting out with:

Great – so now I have to stick to this no matter what?

Not at all. Obviously if I run out of scheduled time for a department, and the task I am working on is a ‘priority’, sacrifices will have to be made. But that’s ok and part of the game. This time allocation is allowed to transform, and will even be revisited on a regular cadence to ensure that I am maintaining the right balance as I evolve.

I’m already anticipating that my Administrative time will not need to be utilized for 5 hours each week. Rather than twiddling my thumbs, I will go through any standard processes for that department and then move onto finance, where I’m sure I will have more than enough accounting & analysis to perform each week.

The Making of My Calendar

This is the best part – I can take everything that I have written up to this point, paste it into ChatGPT, and massage the results with some tweaks that align to my personal quirks. For example, I like working out in the evening, my peak focus time is in the morning, I want to spend at least 4 hours a week with my parents, etc.

Here’s the prompt if you’re interested:

https://chatgpt.com/share/ebf7f1a6-3086-43ae-b5d4-e492cb2ce1ee

---

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to chat more about these topics, I’m always happy to share some ideas. Feel free to send an email, or check out the Discord — links are at the bottom of the screen.