The Itindy method has been invented by T.A. McCann, an american entrepreneur who advised us a few years ago. Here's what T.A. said:

"For me, I developed the ITINDY approach – which stands for “Important things I’m not doing, yet”. As the ideas with merit roll in, I add them to this list, acknowledging both their value (Important) and the fact that I am not losing my current focus to act on them (Randomizing) but I might in the future. Then, I set 2 types of milestones to review the list or specific items; one is “date based” like at the beginning of the quarter or June 1. The second type of milestone and the one we use most often is a “success metric” which could be achieved in the near future or never depending on how the business grows and how right our assumptions were. Examples would include revenue (X MRR), Y number of customers, a funding round > Z, the 10th new hire…all very specific and quantified. If you chose incorrectly on a market, pricing, a sales strategy…you might never achieve these metrics which is where the date-based milestone comes in, giving you an out to make major changes in strategy."

• Stands for: Important Things I’m Not Doing Yet
• Objective: Focus on priorities
• Can be useful for: Any team (Sales, Marketing, tech, etc.)
• Tools: Trello, Notion, Excel, Gsheet...
• Summary of the method: ITINDY is a list gathering all the important ideas that could create a defocus today. The goal is to list all these ideas and to attach 2 triggers or milestones. A trigger based on success metrics based on some hypothesis you made and another one based on a future date. The idea to have both is because you might never reach your success metric. The time-based one is there to tell you to move on at some point if you haven’t reached your objective.
• Method description:

1. Create a list: ITINDY is a list where you put all your ideas that can come from anywhere and that you think are important. You know that when you work for a startup you might have a million ideas. ITINDY is a way to cut through the noise and keep focused
2. Attach to each idea a metric that’ll tell you when to start working on it : Based on some hypothesis I will attach a metric to each idea. This metric will tell me when I should start to work on this idea. For instance you can say that you don’t touch the international market if you haven’t reached more than 10 million of MRR in your domestic market. You can even use ITINDY for your personal life. For instance. I won’t train for a marathon if I don’t run the 10k under one hour easily.
3. Attach a date or deadline to each idea: It allows you to move on if you haven’t reached your success metric. For instance, you might never reach 10 million of MRR in your domestic market. Maybe your hypothesis was wrong. It does not mean you can’t go international. Same thing for the Marathon. Maybe you’ll never reach easily a sub one-hour 10k but you might still be able to run a marathon.

It could look as simple as this :

If you want to get a copy of the Gdoc I built internally click here.