Pay attention to your default behaviour

Everyone has a default behaviour. Not a habit exactly. A fallback. The thing you do when the day is open and you genuinely do not know what the most important thing is.

For some people it is the support queue. For others it is the product: there is always a bug, and fixing one is unambiguously good. For others it is writing: a post, a thread, an essay about running a company. For a few it is chess.

The default is not the problem. Not knowing it is.

Defaults are selected by comfort, not value

You did not choose yours by working out which activity most moved the company. You arrived at it because it reliably produces the feeling of having worked.

Support tickets are perfect for this. Each one has a beginning and an end, somebody is grateful, and the queue is measurably shorter than it was. Product work is nearly as good. A compiler that stops complaining is a small unambiguous yes, available as many times a day as you like.

Sales offers none of that. A day of it can end with nothing: no replies, no meetings booked, no queue shorter. It is the activity least able to compete with your default, which is exactly why the default wins on open days, and why open days are where the funnel dies.

Finding yours

Look at last Tuesday. Not the plan for Tuesday. What actually got done between nine and eleven, before anything urgent arrived.

Then look at the Tuesday before. There is a pattern, and it will be the same thing, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it. Most founders can name theirs in about ten seconds if asked the question directly, and have never been asked the question.

What to do about it, which is less than you would think

The instinct is to eliminate the default. That does not work and is not desirable. Support does need answering, bugs do need fixing, and a founder who does no product work is not going to have a product.

The move is smaller: put the uncomfortable work in front of the default, and make it small enough to survive a bad mood.

Three emails before the support queue. One call booked before the first commit. Not a morning of prospecting. A specific, finishable, unpleasant thing that happens before the comfortable thing, on the days nobody is making you.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Nobody decides to neglect sales. There is no meeting where that is agreed. It happens because on two hundred open days the default won, and each of those days was individually defensible. There really was a ticket, there really was a bug.

The compounding is entirely invisible until it is not, at which point it looks like a bad quarter rather than what it is, which is two hundred small reasonable decisions to do the thing that felt like working.