(Note: When summoned for jury duty, you have the opportunity to get excused by the court if you have a solid reason for why spending time on a trial would be detrimental to you.)

With so much needing to be done for an early stage startup, however, going even a day without doing work, let alone a whole weekend, can result in falling behind. This creates a challenge when trying to make time for those who are most important in your life, as well as giving yourself some down time, so that you can maintain a positive balance for the long haul. I have been guilty of falling short in this area (apologies to just-about-every-person-i-know for this), but I am trying my darndest to get it right.

How I’ve been able to make progress
What I’ve been doing recently is scheduling work time every day, so that when it’s not work time, it’s personal time. If you work best in the daytime, schedule time off at night. If you work best at night, have off in the morning. If you’re an all day type of person, schedule a couple of breaks throughout. And for the times when you’re in a flow and want to continue past a scheduled stoppage, make up for it by adjusting the next day’s schedule.

Without something like this, it can be difficult to create a clear enough separation between work and personal time, and you risk not giving yourself enough of an opportunity to wind down and to avoid burning out.

Weekends are different
For the average weekend, I try to fit in a coupe hours per day to catch up on small tasks that have been lingering around, as well as emails that I’ve fallen behind on — and the rest goes to personal time. This way, I can try to make up for times during the week when I may have neglected family, friends, a significant other, etc., while still remaining in touch with the workload.

Do I have it all figured out? Absolutely not. But startup life isn’t perfect, and what we learn today can be applied tomorrow. Plus, it sure beats having “a regular job.”

If you’re business and can’t talk tech, can you really expect a technologist to work with you on your startup? It’s hard enough for a business person to recruit a good engineer to build their idea, so if there’s a way to close the gap then it should be pursued.

The Bare Minimum:
A non-engineer should be able to hold a basic technical conversation. If you don’t know the difference between “front-end” and “back-end” development, you have some Googling to do. If you think Python is just a kind of snake, add that to your searches. If you don’t have a smartphone (and don’t plan on getting one), you’re kind of missing the boat.

I’ve been meeting a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs who have experience in business but are much distanced from technology, yet they want to do a tech startup. Something’s missing from this equation.

So what can you do?

The Bottom Line:
There are several tech items that a “business person” can do in the early days of a startup when there’s either no one else to do them, or when there’s someone else who could do them but would spend their time more wisely doing something else. Whether it’s putting together mockups with ideas for a user interface or changing the copy on a webpage, nobody would expect you to do the most polished work in these areas as if they were your specialty — it’s more about your willingness to contribute in areas that are not your specialty.

If you’d like specific recommendations for learning how to do anything in particular, post it in the comments.

[Note: This video is WELL worth your time -- just note that there are a couple of curse words in the scene]

The job of an entrepreneur is to listen, and then to act on what’s heard
You know your product or service better than anyone else, but if a significant amount of your customers (or potential customers) clearly want something, you should work toward satisfying that demand. Even though co-founders Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) would have ideally liked to serve a customer in a different way, they made an informed decision based on what the market was telling them. (Sure, in this case it was just one customer, but you get the point.)

To sum up:
Get feedback (lots of it), especially from the kind of people that you envision using your product (and ideally paying for it). Then, make informed decisions based on what you learn. That’s how you build something truly valuable. If you try and breeze through customer development you will likely pay for it on the other side.