Quick Tip for Product managers on Time management

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Do you feel really stressed out when at work? Do you sometimes feel that managing information and actions is tough? Does it feel like everyone is giving you nuggets of information and tasks that are overwhelming for you to juggle?

Well, you’re not alone. Welcome to Product Management.

Handling information and actions is an art. Few are able to manage their internal priority list, let alone the backlog. Most get overwhelmed and burn out. They either stretch their work day or leave out pieces of information or actions from their list.

You know what the biggest problem is? You’re doing this whole juggling in your mind. And your mind is a terrible place to run prioritization of multiple things.

Research has shown you can only manage 3–4 things simultaneously in your head.

Your working memory (the RAM of your brain, if you will) should be spent in storing trivial pieces of information.

There is a wonderful concept of virtual memory in computer science. If you run out of physical memory, you use virtual memory, which stores the data in memory on disk. This releases pressure from the main memory and you are free to handle other things, till the information on the disk becomes important.

So, what’s your disk? Pen & paper of course!

You’re reading this, probably at the start of your workday. I recommend you do the following:

1. Get a piece of paper (notebooks are good, A4 sheets ok — better if you’re reusing)
2. Right down all the tasks ahead of you, for the day
3. Right down any new information you get on the paper. Circle important data pieces.
4. If there is an important action to be taken (coordination/intimation) add a star before it.
5. Continuously add to the list — from information pieces (conversion rate dropped by X%, DAU is on an upward trend MTD, dev team needs to update their story status, whatever!) to action items.
6. “Forget” the information or action — take it out of your working memory.

Tomorrow, before your day starts, review the sheet and see if you need to ignore items or act on some of them.

But wait, you say, this is like a to-do list! Nope! You don’t have any rules here. There is no completion time — this is all organic. The syntax changes as and when you want to — only you know what the symbols mean.

The idea is to swap out as much information as possible to your ‘virtual’ space, leaving you free to take decisions.

Here is the trick that makes this process successful:

Review your list once every hour. You have a few mins between meetings? Review the list. Hell, review the list when people are settling into the meeting — you don’t have to greet everyone!

The review process itself is simple:

1. Scan the list and look for the symbols
2. If something has a priority symbol — check if you can act on it, then and there.
3. If not, move to the next one.
4. Quickly size and prioritize

The main thing to note is that you’re making space for your thinking when you want — it need not be during fixed times that you’ve setup (which is a good thing and you should have half hour in the AM and the PM to review & regroup), but steal time from the meetings and the chaos.

Like a lover stealing glances from their SO, steal time from your day… it can be a few mins, at max.

But, you say, I want some analytics on this! I want to know how many items I have completed and what type of work I’m getting ad-hoc.

Short answer — No you don’t. There is no additional value you can add to your work by ‘knowing’ this quantitatively, when you already know this qualitatively. Human intuition is really powerful. Learn to trust yours.

If you really want to do a weekly review, get a notebook. My boss adopts a more digital stance on this — a Samsung S7+ tab with a pen — it’s successful for him. I prefer pen & paper. Because I get a special joy in crumpling a paper of completed actions and throwing it away. Plus, you can doodle your heart out on the page!

If you’ve made it this far, here is the tip I promised in the title:

Be selfish with your working memory.

Do not let others control your mind-space. You’ve great work to do — don’t let others throw out their responsibilities on you. An urgency on their part doesn’t constitute an urgency at yours. Remember that.

Take control of your time.

All of this takes time — do this for a month and you’ll see yourself being far more effective than you were before.