How early stage employees ask for help
You’ve been #hustling for the past year at your startup. Your team has doubled and doubled again. What was once ten people huddled in a makeshift office is now a group of fifty people collaborating to make this one idea into a ‘real company.’
Grind/Dream poster by Joey Roth.
You’ve never been more excited or more exhausted. You stop to look back at where you were a year ago and are shocked at how little you knew. You took on budget or human resources or design or mobile because someone had to do it. You stepped up to the plate and you did the best you could. You helped get the company where it is today. Although you probably don’t hear it as much as you’d like from your CEO, thank you. Thank you. You are a part of what got the company here today.
The high from looking how far you’ve come quickly wears off when you look back at your inbox. Messages about that upcoming deadline. More engineers coming on board but not enough budget to add more hires who aren’t building the core of the product. You’ve added two people to your team but you still feel like you’re absorbing every loose end. You are the person who took on every challenge before, so why should that change?
Yes, you’ve found yourself reading a blog post about employee burnout but then you catch yourself. Burnout is for other people. Burnout is for people who don’t sleep more than 4 hours a day. Hm, maybe you should read do a little research on how people get by with 4 hours of sleep, you could do that just for a little while, right?
NO! Less sleep is never (#hustle mindset: rarely) the answer. What you need help with is reprioritizing. You have too many things on your plate that you can no longer see what’s important. There is no way that you’re doing an excellent job at too many things. It’s impossible.
How do you prioritize when everything feels business critical? First, not everything is business critical, and if it is, then why aren’t any of the other 20-50 people on your team working on this? Everything is not business critical.
Take a deep breath. Say it with me now: “Everything is not business critical.” Repeat it until you believe it.
Now, how do you know what is business critical? Make a priority list by using three questions:
- What am I working on?
- What should I be working on?
- What would I work on if I had more time?