I get asked all the time how Sealed is going and what I’m doing to make it happen, and one phrase always bubbles to the surface as the most accurate response: “lots of little things”.

By little things, I don’t mean that the task in front of me is ‘little’, nor that it will be easy or happen overnight. What I do mean to communicate is that my day-to-day is not as straightforward as entering an office at 9am and working on an excel spreadsheet for 8 hours until quitting time. There may be days that I spend eight hours on a single task, but frankly those days are few and far between. What I usually end up doing is a lot of little things.

These are the big things: Design the UI and continuously investigate UX. Keep in touch with the dev team and make sure things are happening. Build a team. Find experienced mentors and advisors. Figure out the business plan. Continuously create and update all pitching materials. Figure out marketing and make a promo video. Find the right investors and prove to them that Sealed will make them money.

But I could never say to someone, “yeah, I built a team today, and tomorrow I’ll raise a 500K seed round”. These are not “tasks” so much as they are goals that guide what I do from day to day. My job is to take each of these tasks and break them into their most achievable components, and then achieve micro-tasks until the larger task itself becomes achievable.

So on any day, I might work on a few UI screens, email a few potential advisors, marketing gurus, or potential teammates, read about the Boston VC / Angel landscape and identify potential funding avenues, or refine or execute a section of the video ad script.

What I don’t hear people talking about enough is timing. In my experience, timing is everything. It’s like cooking a multi-course meal. The meat has to be defrosted for hours before cooking time, and then marinated long before the asparagus goes on the grill. It wouldn’t make sense to make the balsamic vinaigrette dressing at 8am when it wouldn’t be needed until dinnertime, just as it doesn’t make sense to email everyone-and-their-mom months before the app is anywhere close to being ready.

So I do lots of little things every day, with the top of my task list being revealed to me daily from a panoptic assessment of where I’m at and where I should probably go next. Key word ‘probably’, as I’ve definitely already defrosted the meat too early and overcooked the asparagus, but luckily Whole Foods is right around the corner and has a special on their coconut chicken.

One little thing: Sealed was on Betalist yesterday. Sign up and share, people!