Quarterly schlep inventory
The unsexy work you've been avoiding because it's annoying, not because it's wrong. Five prompts, a scoring rubric, an assigned-and-dated column. Run it once a quarter to surface what the strategy doc cannot see.
Paul Graham's schlep blindness essay made the case that founders systematically avoid the unsexy work. Not because they cannot do it. Because it is annoying enough that the brain quietly stops noticing it as work, and starts treating it as background. The startups that win usually win on a stack of done schleps that nobody else got around to.
The point of a quarterly schlep inventory is to make the avoidance visible. Once you can see what you have been not doing, you can pick the two or three that pay off most and assign them. The rest stay on the list. The list itself is the artefact.
Run this once a quarter, by yourself first, then with the team.
Part 1: Five surfacing prompts
Write the answers fast. The first thing that comes to mind is usually the right one. Pre-editing kills the inventory.
- What is the unfinished thing in our system that everyone has stopped seeing?
- What conversation have I been avoiding for more than four weeks?
- What single piece of admin, paperwork, or follow-up has been on my list for three quarters in a row?
- What customer-facing decision are we silently absorbing because the fix is annoying? (Pricing exceptions, support escalations, manual reporting, missed SLAs.)
- What hire, fire, or contract renegotiation have I been postponing because the conversation is uncomfortable rather than because the call is wrong?
Five answers each, minimum. Twenty-five line items. The first ten will be obvious. The valuable ones are usually in the back half.
Part 2: Score each schlep
Two columns, one to five each.
- Cost of avoiding it (1 = mild annoyance / 5 = compounding strategic damage)
- Cost of doing it (1 = an afternoon / 5 = a fortnight of senior time)
Multiply for a rough priority score. Anything scoring 12+ where avoiding-cost is 4 or 5 is a candidate for this quarter. Scoring is a sorter, not a verdict — judgement decides the final picks.
Part 3: The pick
Pick the top three. No more. A schlep inventory with twelve assignments becomes a wishlist; a schlep inventory with three picks becomes a quarter's plan.
- Schlep 1: ______. Owner: ______. Due: ______.
- Schlep 2: ______. Owner: ______. Due: ______.
- Schlep 3: ______. Owner: ______. Due: ______.
Owner is one person; "the team" is not an owner. Due is a date this quarter. Both fields are non-negotiable; without them, the schlep returns next quarter unmoved.
Part 4: The remaining list
The schleps you did not pick stay on the list. Do not delete them. Most of them will be picked in a future quarter, and the inventory works as a record of what you used to avoid. Reading last quarter's unpicked list is itself diagnostic. Items that survive three quarters in a row deserve a separate conversation about why.
Why this works
The schleps a market does not solve are usually moats once one company solves them. Stripe's documentation. Square's onboarding. Notion's import tools. None of them was the headline feature. All of them were schleps competitors had been avoiding for years. The inventory is the mechanism that converts schleps into an unfair advantage on a quarterly cadence.
The work you avoid because it is annoying is usually the work the next ten companies will also avoid. Doing it is the cheapest moat available to a small team.
Template from Marga Haus · margahaus.com/resources · Adapt and use freely. Attribution appreciated, not required.