My Top to Bottom System For Running a 7-Figure, Bootstrapped Business Part-Time
Productivity systems. Make ’em fancy, make ’em simple. At the end of the day they need to achieve one thing — making sure the reality of how you spend your time matches your intention.
You really can’t dive into productivity without first figuring out what the heck you should be working on, AKA priorities.
The absolute bible of this topic is the book The One Thing. Honestly the title alone tells you a lot, but I’ll give you the rest. The core question is of the One Thing philosophy: What’s the One Thing I can that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?
(Hint: get that done first.)
However, I don’t follow the entire system of the book — in fact I don’t really follow any of it, and I specifically am not a fan of time blocking. (You’ll see how I DON’T follow a planned ahead schedule, and what I do instead later in this article.)
Figuring out your priorities is a whoooole other topic! You can be the most productive person in the world, but who cares if you’re not getting the important stuff done. And it’s VERY, very easy to spend all day on things that don’t make a difference. I would say it’s the default human state. So you really have to be diligent about not sliding into it.
OK, so assuming you know what you want to do, how do you make sure it gets done?
Here’s how I do it.
And I have to say — I’m gonna go ahead of give myself a gold star in getting priorities done. I’m not perfect, but I’ve worked part-time since 2015 and had some pretty major success in that time.
Currently, I work 10–15 hours/week. I want to be clear this is not some “hack” for writing three books a week in just fifteen hours. I do not have a huge amount of output. What I create is results — making sure my business is a machine that’s creating an excellent product for coaches and making a great profit doing it.
I do want to state clearly that I launched my current business, Paperbell, while working part-time. (Actually not only was I working part time, but I had a two year old and five year old at home because we launched during the pandemic in 2020. So yeah, definitely not a lot of extra work hours happening.)
I’m throwing that in because something I hear a LOT is “sure, you work part-time now, but it’s impossible get something off the ground without a ton of hours”. Well, I’m living proof that it’s possible.
Monday Morning Planning
The big secret to getting the right things done is planning ahead before you sit down to work. You don’t want to be trusting your whims, your inbox, your slack, or your latest shiny object to guide your time.
I do my weekly planning on Monday morning. Some people do it Sunday night, or the end of the day Friday, that bit doesn’t matter.
Here’s my Monday process:
✅ First, I check my goals/priorities
This can be your one page annual plan, your quarterly goals, OKRs, KPIs — really doesn’t matter what system you use. What matters if you have decided ahead of time some kind of plan for what’s important. I generally like to pick three big rocks per quarter, which I put in a priority order.
I keep mine in a google doc that’s on my chrome bookmarks bar so that I can easily reference it throughout my workweek.
Here’s the thing — you usually can’t actually just keep hammering away at your One Thing until it’s done.
You’ll probably be waiting on information, other people, etc. In your weekly planning, you’re figuring out what you can do THIS WEEK to make progress on your priorities. Maybe it’s sending a follow up email, sourcing something, completing a piece of it, meeting with someone. The important part is that it’s being chipped away at.
So I take break down my “big rocks” into what needs to be done THIS WEEK and create tasks for myself in ClickUp that are due this week.
Sometimes I do it as a subtask under one big rock item, or it can be it’s own standalone task. I find details like that really don’t matter.
✅ Next, I review what else might be on my to-do list
In the screenshot you’ll see a clickup board called “current sprint”. We don’t really use a “sprint” system, I just like the name! Anyway this is kind of “current random stuff” that doesn’t have its own board (for example, our blog has its own board).
Here’s what each column means:
JAN — FEB — MAR That’s a way of saying “this quarter” — as a way of reigning myself in, I try to only put things on this board that I want to happen this quarter. Otherwise it has to go on my “ideas” board and could get pulled in next quarter.
PREP These are the items that are coming up next — sometimes I am still gathering parts or ideas for them, or this column can be a way of showing the shortlist of what will happen next.
CURRENT self-explanatory
CLOSED self-explanatory
My current sprint board is where all the random things I want to get done get deposited during the week. (They automatically go in the first column as a kind of holding pen.) These could be tasks I created, or could be pulled directly from my inbox or slack (using integrations).
So on Monday I review the state of the current sprint board to see if anything has gone overdue, and what’s on there that I have room for this week.
Notice that this happens AFTER reviewing my priorities list. This is how you make sure that your big priorities are getting space before all the random minutia. (AKA big rocks before pebbles!) This is also when I take things on the current sprint board and assign them to other people.
✅ Lastly, plan my tasks for each day in ClickUp
OK, this is where the actual “to do” list happens. I take all the tasks I want to get done this week and assign them to myself with a deadline. Then I use ClickUp’s weekly view (again, bookedmarked on my chrome toolbar) which automatically shows each task on the day its due. Now I have a rough plan for the week.
In the past, I’ve done this plan on paper but currently I’m finding using the ClickUp weekly view is the most effective for me. It gives me an easy short-hand for if something is a “real” task — if its assigned to me, with a deadline it will show up here and needs to get done. (Tasks without a deadline won’t show in this view.)
Actually Doing The Things on The Plan
MAKING the plan is one thing, FOLLOWING the plan is another!
As you can see from the above, I do pick a day for each task and spread my tasks out over the week.
But here’s something that might surprise you: I do not stick to that daily plan.
I do what I feel like in the moment — as long as it’s on the list.
For me, this is the perfect balance between making a smart plan ahead of time and being “in flow”. If I’m in a writing mood, I can pick off all my writing tasks. If I’m in a spreadsheet mood, I do that.
The other important practice I have is not making my schedule jam-packed. You can see on the screenshot above the most I have on one day is 5 things — but sometimes those things are 5-minute tasks. I try to really use the Monday planning time to filter what is essential for moving the business forward, and totally eliminate any busywork.
This means that sometimes I get my “week” done by Monday or Tuesday. If that happens, excellent. I have space to mess around with other things that I’m interested in, like writing this article!
How I Work With My Team
This article is about how I work, but I am certainly not creating results alone!
The Paperbell team is 100% part-time or project-based freelancers. We have a small team of regular part-time freelancers, and we pull in subject matter experts for one-off or sporadic projects (for example, designing a free report PDF). At my last company MeetEdgar, our team was almost entirely full-time, W2 employees. (And to be clear I worked part-time for most of my years there as well.)
At the time of writing, my work is a mix of CEO type work and marketing individual contributor work. The CEO work includes things like making budgets and projections, making sure activities are matched to strategy, keeping everyone in the loop, and sourcing and hiring people to work with. My marketing work includes activities like writing emails, giving specific direction for marketing initiatives, putting together promotional sequences, writing ad copy, and keeping up on marketing trends/strategies.
If my team sends me something to review or give feedback on, I make it into a task. Or, they’ll create a task for me directly.
More Strategies I Use To Get a Lot Done in A Short Amount of Time
👉 I use focused work session apps
I regularly use both Centered and Flow Club: these are tools that set up a container for your work session and remind you to stay focused. In flow club you join live coworking sessions, and centered is great for an “on demand” focused work session.
👉 I work in a dedicated office
Instead of working from home, I rent a private office. This is a great way to remind myself that I’m there to WORK, not mess around pinning ideas for my living room which I can do on my laptop at home. I’ve got a giant monitor and everything I need to stay productive and focused (and none of the distractions I don’t need!)
👉 I get up when I find myself “messing around”
When you find yourself messing around on random tasks I find the best way to combat it is to physically get up out of your seat. Stretch, look out the window, reset.
I check in with myself — am I done working for now? Do I want to take a walk? Do I just need to re-open my weekly plan and get myself focused again? Basically I check in with how I’m feeling and what I want. I have a little reset and stop myself before I go deep down the internet rabbit hole!
👉 I don’t have meetings
My calendar is a barren wasteland and I love it. We have no recurring meetings at Paperbell, and it’s very rare that we have a live meeting about anything. So I actually have ALL of my work time to get my priorities done, not the tiny sliver left over once the meetings are done.
We’re an entirely self-serve business so we also don’t offer any kind of sales calls or demo calls, and working with large partners is also not part of our business. I know a lot of founders get their time eaten up with 1:1 sales calls, but I’ve always run my businesses on one-to-many marketing vs 1:1 sales from day one. I’ve actually never done a sales demo for MeetEdgar or Paperbell.
👉 I‘m an Inbox Zero devotee
My inbox is always a small, and I hit zero at minimum once every week. Inbox zero stops you from “using your inbox as a to-do list” because your to-do list genuinely isn’t in there. (I alluded to it earlier, but the short version of my inbox zero system is forwarding anything to my ClickUp list that actually needs to be done. I also do a lot of deleting, and don’t share my email publicly.)
👉 I work limited hours
This one is a little snake-eating-its-own-tail, but I believe that the less hours you have to get things done the more efficient you are. I don’t know about you, but I slam through tasks when it’s that last hour before school pick-up/time to meet your friend for happy hour!
The act of limiting my work hours in itself makes me more efficient. I’ve trained myself that work time is actually for getting shit done, not scrolling twitter or sitting in useless meetings for hours.
👉 I’m a ruthless delegator
I save my time for the two buckets of work I described above — CEO work and marketing work. (To be clear we also have a ton of marketing work that happens without me, like all of our content marketing.) Everything in your business needs to get done by someone, but that someone does not have to be you!
I pass off most tasks from the start and also “stop, drop and delegate” when I find myself spending time on something that could easily be done by someone else. For example, I’m not very good at putting spreadsheet data into visual representations or figuring out a complex formulas. So if I find myself diving into one of those tasks I’ll stop, delegate those parts of the work, then come back to do the final analysis.
I also wrote about how I’ve had others handle customer service from day one here.
That’s it! Everything I do to run a successful, profitable SaaS company in 10–15 hrs/week.
