Focus on what matters most and ignore the rest

Only work on what matters most. Stop worrying about things you can't control.

If all you do is spend all day is responding to other people's requests, you never actually march towards your own priorities. You need to create priorities and then set aside some amount of time each day that you just work on your own priority.

You work on problems that have a 10X positive or negative impact. In most FinTech companies one of two problems, it's a growth problem or a compliance problem because both of them can have a negative or positive 10X impact.

Waking up every morning, what is the most impactful thing I could do today?

I don't have a to-do list of 20 things. I try to have a to-do list of three of the most important highest leverage things that could have impact broadly across the company.

All your tasks are not created equal, there are actually three type of tasks... L tasks which are leverage tasks... when you put in a certain amount of effort, you get 10X or 100X in return in terms of impact.

The L tasks, PMs implicitly just deep down they know what their L tasks are, because those are the tasks that are bothering them the most because they are not doing them or because they're not doing them as well as they know they should.

The reason we procrastinate on these tasks are, one, because we know that they're L tasks, we know the impact they'll have, and we are a little scared... The second is they require dedicated attention. And again, we are afraid about whether we'll have anything interesting to say.