At a company, product, marketing, and finance are three different teams’ jobs. A solo founder or freelancer runs all three alone.
Carta’s Solo Founders Report found that the share of new startups with a single founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025.
You build a feature in the morning, write a social post in the afternoon, and check your bank balance at night.
The problem is that all three end up tangled together in your head at the same priority level.
Focus on one and the other two sit untouched for days, and looking back later, none of them feel like they moved forward at all.
Putting several goals under one structure
Running several areas alone doesn’t mean managing each one separately; it means putting them side by side under one structure you can see all at once. Something like this:
- Running a sustainable solo business (the identity you’re building toward)
- Product: launch the beta: sub-tasks like “finish the 3 core features” and “recruit 10 testers.” Measured done-or-not.
- Marketing: 100 signups a month: track signups per channel as a running number, with “publish content 3x a week” as a recurring habit.
- Finance: build 3 months of runway: track the remaining amount as a number, with “review spending every month” as a habit.
All three goals are measured differently, but they all live on the same screen.
Open today’s view and you’ll see “send the tester recruitment email” (product), “draft this week’s content” (marketing), and “review this month’s spending” (finance) listed together, and each one shows exactly which goal it’s feeding into.
Why you don’t have to re-decide priorities every day
With a team, you’d settle “what to do this week” in a meeting. Alone, the tree structure does that job instead.
Research from UC Irvine’s Gloria Mark found it takes about 23 minutes to fully return to a task after switching away from it, and bouncing between product, marketing, and finance by gut feel alone means paying that cost over and over in a single day.
TIP Batch same-domain work into blocks
Even when product, marketing, and finance tasks are mixed on today’s list, you don’t have to work through them in random order. Group same-domain tasks together, product in the morning and marketing in the afternoon, say, and you cut the number of switches down to once or twice a day, saving yourself that 23-minute recovery cost each time.
Even with product, marketing, and finance tasks mixed together on today’s list, you can see where each item sits within its own goal, making a call like “marketing’s been neglected lately, so content comes first today” much easier.
And if completions keep piling up on one goal while another hasn’t moved in days, that imbalance is immediately visible too.
WARNING The domain with the most items steers the overall number
Progress at the top is weighted by how many bottom-level items sit under each branch. If product is broken into fine-grained tasks while finance stays lumped into one or two, the overall figure effectively tracks product. To read the balance across the three domains from progress alone, break them down to a similar level of detail.
How does each goal actually break down into real tasks
Even a sub-goal like “Product: launch the beta” from the example above is still big on its own.
Splitting “finish the 3 core features” further by time period, then nesting a recurring habit or task underneath for what you’ll actually touch this week, is what makes today’s action clear.
For the concrete method behind splitting one goal into time periods and then into a recurring habit, Breaking a Big Goal Into Small Habits walks through it using a marathon as the example.
Whether it’s product, marketing, or finance, the same approach works regardless of the area, as long as the goal has a clear finish line.
Sometimes the feeling of losing direction shows up first
Sometimes, before you even open the tree to check which area has fallen behind, a vague feeling arrives first: “I don’t know what I’ve actually been doing lately.”
That’s not a sign of laziness. It’s much closer to a sign that which goal each of today’s tasks is feeding into has quietly gone blurry.
With a team, someone in a meeting re-orients you. Alone, you have to play that role yourself.
Why this feeling shows up and how to handle it is covered in more detail in The Burnout That Shows Up When You Can’t See Where Today’s Work Is Going.
Working alone doesn’t mean working without structure
Having no fixed team and no set process doesn’t mean everything has to run without any system at all.
Put several goals under one tree in Retic, and without opening each area separately, you can see on a single screen exactly which goal any task on today’s list feeds into, and where that goal currently stands.
No meetings, no manager, no set process, and still, the tree structure alone lets you answer both “what should I do right now” and “where is that actually going” for yourself.
When you’re running several goals alone, that structure does the job a team would otherwise do: keeping you pointed in the right direction.