How do founders here deal with waiting time? E.g. Waiting for a customer's reply before proceeding further, waiting for users to try out the product and give the feedback needed, etc.? Or is it even normal to have stretches of time where it <i>feels</i> like there is no work to be done?
I try to have three different priority levels: (1) for things that need to get done soon, (2) for things that are worth doing but aren't so urgent and (3) things I do to improve and recover myself.<p>I never run out of things to do in category (2). (you can always build links, improve your toolset, work on longer-term features, try to hustle up the next customer...)<p>And don't forget about (3) -- sometimes the best thing you can do is go to the gym, go for a walk, or chill out playing a video game. Burnout is one of the most dangerous and insidious things, and doing things to renew yourself can really help your productivity.<p>To take an example, I was coding something up the other day, looking at a really old codebase I didn't understand -- I took a stab at solving the problem and I was totally baffled. I took two hours off, went to the gym, and when I came back I solved the problem in 15 minutes. If my head was in a cloud, I could have wasted days trying to figure it out.<p>On some level though, your question seems pretty strange to me. For my own startup, my 'management plan' involves seven different sectors -- these involve different aspects of software development, content production, marketing, etc. There are dependencies between tasks in these sectors, but there's always something that can be done. The real challenges are (i) managing my energy [not spinning my wheels, not burning out] and (ii) making sure the tasks that are critical to getting revenue in are done soon enough...
Oh, one more thing, this is the exact reason I left my last job -- we were in a place where it took us a whole year to sign a customer up for a free trial... We set the system up for them in October, and they didn't even look at it until February.<p>I learned at this point to see long sales processes as a "bad smell." Now maybe there are some things that really take a long time to sell (Nuclear power plants, for instance.) but personally I think salespeople are the most hated people on the planet and that they're going to be first ones to go as we approach the singularity. If your product is hard to sell, you should be selling a different product.<p>I've seen so many enterprise products go by that cost, say $30K, and the sales process is so extensive that it costs them $15K worth of salesperson time to sell the product and it costs the customer another $30K worth of their own time to make a decision. The product is worth $15K, but sales overhead puffs up the cost to $60K to the customer.<p>This has just got to stop.