How top entrepreneurs Figure out the most important thing to do right now

For the first 5 years of my life as an entrepreneur, I sucked at prioritizing.

Now, founders often describe my superpower as asking the kinds of questions that make the next step clear.

What changed?

I learned this simple tool to find the most important thing to work on right now.

I call it the Flow Razor.

That's mostly because I think it sounds cool.

It stems from this: all businesses fundamentally look the same. Seriously! You can describe any business — from Walmart to your startup — with the same six metrics: awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, & referral.

(These are the so-called "pirate metrics", because the acronym is AAARRR.)

What these metrics are actually measuring will vary from company to company, but the flow is the same: people need to know about it (awareness), encounter it (acquisition), get value out of it (activation), pay for it (revenue), stay with it (retention), and help you acquire others (referral).

The purpose of any business is to put the greatest volume of people into the process and keep them moving through each stage as efficiently as possible. I call this “flow” (Ash Maurya calls it “throughput”).

Therefore, the Flow Razor is:

The most important thing to do right now is the one that will have the greatest immediate impact on flow.

Start by categorizing every task by which metrics they are expected to impact.

Some will help increase engagement, which helps with retention. Some will help you acquire more users. Some will get more users to convert. And this exercise allows you to prioritize things for this moment in time:

There’s no point in working on retention if you can’t get users to sign up.

Apply the Flow Razor to your to do list:

• If it has no impact on flow, delete it from your to do list. By definition, it won't get you more customers, better customers, more money, etc. It's a complete waste of time.

• If it could have an impact on flow in the future, throw it in the backlog. We'll get to it when and if it becomes necessary.

• But if it could have an impact on flow right this very moment, consider doing it.

And of those things you should consider doing, the one that you should do is the one you expect to have the greatest immediate impact on flow.

For now, nothing else matters.