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Hi {{first_name}},
I’ve heard versions of this idea from a few people, Alex Hormozi talks about something similar, but the framing I keep coming back to is my own shorthand: thinking in minutes versus thinking in months.
Here’s what I mean. Take a strategic priority, the kind that actually matters. In most companies, that priority lives inside a cadence. It comes up in the monthly review. Someone looks at it and says, “We’ve got the all-hands next Tuesday. I’ll make sure we discuss it there so we can move it forward.” Perfectly reasonable. The ball keeps rolling.
But notice what just happened: the priority is now traveling at the speed of the calendar. One touch a month. That’s thinking in months.
Thinking in minutes is a different reflex entirely. Same priority, but the question becomes: how do I execute on this right now? What’s the bottleneck, and what can I do in the next ten minutes to break it? Send the email before lunch. Make the call today. Get the decision made this afternoon instead of putting it on next week’s agenda.
Run the rough math. The month-thinker touches the priority nine times in nine months. The minute-thinker who finds ten minutes most working days touches it something like 180 times in the same stretch. Twenty times the contact with the thing that supposedly matters most. And the compounding is quiet: after a month or two, the two approaches look almost identical. After two quarters, they’re not even playing the same game. The minute-thinker sometimes makes more progress in a day than the calendar makes in a month.
Two honest caveats. First, this isn’t about working more hours. It’s about where the next ten minutes go, and it usually replaces meeting-preparation theater rather than adding to the pile. Second, nothing survives being treated this way at scale. Try to think in minutes about everything and you’re just frantic. The move is picking the one or two priorities that deserve a faster clock, and consciously refusing to let the calendar set their pace.
Which connects back to where this series started. The three-lever discipline tells you what matters. This tells you how fast to pull. Once you know the lever, “we’ll discuss it Tuesday” starts to sound like what it is: a decision to go slow.
This week: name your one minute-clock priority. Then, each morning, one question. What can I do about it right now?
Talk soon,
Matt
P.S. When I’m not writing this, I’m buying and operating founder-led businesses for the long term at Eidolon Capital. If you’re a founder thinking about your next chapter, or you advise one who is, just hit reply. I read every note.