Sloppy tasks are failing your startup
How scattered, poorly-defined tasks are hemorrhaging bandwidth from your team
Life at most startups is a very specific kind of daily hell—especially for founders.
You wake up in the morning, immediately confronted by a list of dozens, even hundreds of tasks. Overwhelmed by sheer volume, you switch to Slack, only to find more tasks (in the form of questions, requests, and problems) scattered across channels and DMs. Apple Notes and random scraps of paper, accumulated over days and weeks, add to the existential weight of your looming responsibility with no apparent end in sight.
Every tool screams for attention. None offers clarity.
The day passes in a blur of apparent busyness. Yet by evening, you have no sense of what you’ve actually accomplished. Some days feel more productive than others, but on the whole, you’re spinning wheels.
It’s not your imagination: your tasks are failing you—and the constant, ambiguous haze they create is sabotaging your entire enterprise.
What do failing tasks look like?
Your tasks are failing your startup because they lack clarity, structure, and trustworthiness. They typically fall into these common traps:
Overwhelming and unactionable
Too big to start: “Redesign onboarding flow” isn’t a task—it’s a major feature.
Too vague to act on: “Improve user experience” doesn’t clarify what exactly needs to happen next.
Too meaningless to interpret: “Contract bullet points” is not only unactionable, nobody knows what the hell it means—including whoever wrote it.
Fragmented and scattered
Tasks live everywhere—Slack, Notion, emails, quick conversations—creating confusion, duplicates, and lost context.
Merely locating a nagging task costs emotional bandwidth and pushes something else out of working memory.
Unclear or unscoped
“Think about next quarter,” or “Follow up with investors,” leave crucial details unstated, requiring constant clarification or guesswork.
These kinds of tasks never feel “done” because they literally aren’t. When exactly can you claim you’re done following up with investors or thinking about next quarter—after funding? Once the quarter ends?
The hidden costs of poor task definition
Unclear tasks aren’t merely inconvenient. They’re expensive in ways you may not fully realize:
Wasted time
Every unclear task demands clarification. Every clarification is an interruption, and interruptions derail deep, creative work. Your team spends valuable hours each week simply figuring out what to do, rather than doing it.
Team friction and frustration
When tasks aren’t clearly defined, misunderstandings multiply. Work gets duplicated, misaligned, or dropped entirely. Team trust suffers, morale deteriorates, and simple tasks spiral into frustrating debates about scope and intention.
Reduced trust in your systems
When tasks are unreliable, trust breaks down. People start managing tasks privately, in separate notes or mental checklists, eroding your central task management system. When trust falls too far, the entire system collapses.
Opportunity cost and strategic distraction
Poorly-defined tasks manufacture urgent distractions. The chaos prevents your team from focusing on high-impact strategic work, slowing your startup’s ability to innovate and compete. When tasks are unclear or poorly scoped, you can’t meaningfully prioritize one over another—leaving you reacting chaotically to whatever bubbles to the surface.
Diagnosing the core problem: tasks vs. non-tasks
At the root of these failures lies a fundamental misunderstanding: you’re mislabeling your work.
Tasks define your day-to-day actions. They must be discrete, concrete, and immediately actionable. If it’s large, abstract, or has multiple unclear steps, it’s not a task. It’s probably something else:
Features: “New onboarding flow” is a product feature requiring detailed planning and multiple discrete tasks.
OKRs: “Raise seed round” is an objective tied to specific key results (e.g., dollar amounts, timelines), not a single actionable step.
Campaigns, applications, product ideas: These represent different kinds of work, each with their own lifecycles, requiring numerous discrete day-to-day steps.
Mixing tasks with non-tasks makes it impossible to plan either because they belong to fundamentally different layers of abstraction. Tasks are scoped at the daily or sprint level; other types of work are scoped at increments appropriate for their complexity—months, quarters, even years.
More importantly, tasks realize higher-level work. They’re the concrete steps that release features, launch campaigns, and achieve strategic objectives.
What happens when tasks are done right?
Imagine every task clearly stating exactly what to do, who would do it, and when it’s due (at an appropriate, flexible timescale). The benefits are immediate and substantial:
Clear, trustworthy daily work
Tasks become reliable building blocks for daily productivity. Every team member starts their day knowing exactly what’s expected, with a single comprehensive list they can trust. No confusion. No wasted effort.
Better collaboration
Clear tasks enable effortless collaboration. Handoffs become seamless, misunderstandings vanish, and productivity skyrockets.
Preparedness for AI tools
Clarity today unlocks capabilities tomorrow. Well-structured tasks aren’t just about productivity—they position your startup to harness future AI-driven tools.
Clearly structured tasks mean your startup can easily leverage upcoming AI agents, automating entire workflows overnight. If tasks are clear enough for human handoff, they’re also ready for AI handoff. Imagine assigning tomorrow’s fully scoped feature implementation not to a human engineer but to an AI agent, autonomously completing it before your morning coffee.
If your tasks remain chaotic, you’ll be left behind by startups prepared for this AI-powered future.
The path forward: how to fix your tasks
Fixing tasks isn’t complicated, just intentional. You must leave your comfort zone, apply discipline, and break counterproductive habits. Yes, this will feel uncomfortable—but it’s critically necessary.
Your goal is to build muscle memory for tasks that are actionable, trustworthy, and clearly separated from higher-level work:
Clearly scope every task
Tasks must represent a clear action step.
Tasks should contain enough context for someone else to pick up and complete without further clarification.
Centralize all tasks in one place
Commit fully to one trusted task management tool—ideally, a structured system in Notion. Let go of tools and habits from your personal life or previous roles.
Clearly defined, centralized tasks eliminate confusion, duplication, and anxiety.
Treat tasks as persistent work surfaces
Tasks stay open until entirely done, holding all necessary context and resources.
Tasks aren’t mere checkboxes; they’re trusted, persistent work surfaces.
Your tasks can work for you (and your startup)
The solution to overwhelming tasks isn’t working harder—it’s working clearer. Imagine ending each day knowing exactly what’s completed and exactly what’s next. Imagine never again second-guessing your priorities or wasting hours chasing scattered, unclear tasks.
Working harder now takes on new meaning: you choose to put in effort because the work genuinely matters—not because you’re compensating for inefficiencies or ambiguities of bad systems. You work smarter and harder on what moves your startup forward, faster and more powerfully than ever.