Productivity Systems for Product People: The Productivity Hydra
The job titles around product management are a mess. Depending on where you work (geography, but also sector, company, stage of the company and more) your job title might be Product Manager, Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, VP Product, Head of Product… and all of those might have the same responsibilities. Because of that, I’m going to use PM or “Product Person” to refer generically to someone with product-related responsibilities in this blog post.
A productivity system is just a way to organise yourself so you get stuff done. There’s probably a bunch of definitions in literature including all kinds of nuance and specific inclusions and exclusions, but that’s what I’m going with here.
The inspiration for this post is mostly the writer/academic, Cal Newport. He spends a lot of time writing about human relationship with technology, and of particular interest to me, productivity systems. The reason I felt the need to write my own piece on the topic, instead of just pointing at Deep Work and saying “there you go” is that I haven’t found his systems to work especially well when mapped directly into fast moving software environments; I’ve had to make some modifications.
One of the key determinants of “knowledge work” is that the first things we have to do is figure out what to do (on some time scale.) There is no set amount of work to be done. There is no handle to crank that outputs identical widgets.
PM roles vary, but most of them include juggling far more ideas than your working memory can hold at once. If we look to the common juggling metaphor, we might have 40 or more things on the go at any time, probably including stuff from every sector of an Eisenhower Matrix. Every time you can finish deal with one thing, there’s at least one more thing in its place. Cal Newport calls it the Productivity Dragon, but it’s really a Productivity Hydra.
Without a systematic approach it would be trivially easy to always pursue the most urgent thing, leaving important but non-urgent tasks until they become urgent (or never doing them at all.) Thus we need a way to a) remember all these things despite the limits to our working memory, and b) make sure we allocate time to important things, not just urgent things.
I believe that all knowledge workers require some kind of productivity system*. As far as I can tell, there are four key aspects of a productivity system for PMs, none of which are unique, but they certainly aren’t identical to every other knowledge worker either. Those things are…
- It should allow periods of deep focus , despite the conflicting demands on our time.
- It should allow flexibility to adapt to changing demands on your time.
- It should be light weight. We have enough things to do, a productivity system should be making our life easier, not harder.
- It should result in full capture. Like I mentioned earlier, we’re each probably juggling 40 work balls alone, let alone other sources of things to do. If we’re dropping things, it should be an intentional choice, not an accident.
Slaying The Hydra
- Capture Everything
There’s actually two components here, and both of them are making up for the fact my working memory simply isn’t sufficient to keep track of all the things I need to do.
Day-to-day, I keep notes in a physical column. Every time something comes up, be that a random thought I have during the day, something someone asks me for, or even a slack message I need to remember to reply to, I note it down. If I get to it during the day (most of the short tasks get done each day), I cross it off.
If I don’t, I transfer it to a more robust capture location — a Trello board dedicated to work things, with any contextual notes I might need to remember what that note was about.
2. Recurring Weekly Schedules
This might be a Rory-specific problem, but I find if I leave my calendar open it ends up with a random hodge-podge of meetings at awkward times and with awkward gaps between them. To be able to do deeply focused work, we need uninterrupted blocks of time to think about one thing — ideally at least 90 minutes. How many of those you need will vary depending on your specific role, but personally I have five scheduled per week.
I actually book a meeting with myself for those blocks (90 minutes to 2 hours each) whereupon I decline meetings that overlap (with some caveats.) My calendar is public to everyone in my organisation, and if they care to look, they’ll see a number of blocks labelled as “Deep Work” recurring at regular times weekly. If you work as a member of a team, it might be worth having a frank discussion about aligning your deep work periods with their equivalents.
3. Daily Plans
The first thing I do each day is make a plan for the day. That includes any calendar tidy-up that’s necessary (overlapping meetings, removing unnecessary ones, that sort of thing), but also assigning those Deep Work blocks to a specific thing. Depending what I need to do, that might vary, but those blocks get relabelled to the specific output I’m hoping for (today, clearly, was Write Blog Post.)
Those blocks are specific, deep work. Exactly what constitutes “deep work” is probably a story for another time, but they are only for the labelled task. Not scrolling social media, checking emails, replying to instant messages, or any one of the other deluge of things you need to do in a day.
4. Admin Blocks
The final thing I do to help keep on top of the Hydra is schedule admin blocks. Admin blocks are similar to deep work blocks except they’re shorter (I usually use 30 or 60 minute blocks) and they’re less focussed. These are the blocks where I really try to tick off as many of the “little” jobs we have to do — reply to emails, Slack messages, schedule meetings, send that person that link we promised them…
The real difference to between a Deep Work block and an Admin Block is that in an Admin Block I’m allowed to jump randomly between tasks if my brain says that’s the right thing to do. Of course, those tasks should probably be prioritised somewhat still, but most of these tasks are 10 minutes of work or less, and there’s no real need to stay deeply focussed and thinking on one thing.
If you’re familiar with Cal Newport’s work, you’ll note that I’ve completely removed his concept of a Weekly Plan. I’ve actually toyed around with this a lot, but I can’t figure out a way to make it work when my team and environment move as fast as they do… If you’ve managed to make it work, I’d love to hear how you did it. Otherwise, if you have another way to structure your time, I’d like to hear your approach. If you found this somewhere between useful, interesting, or thought provoking, give me a clap and follow for more.
*I want to draw clear distinction here between the idea that we do need a productivity system and that we should need a productivity system. The first is certainly true. The second is probably false, but I’ll let you make up your own mind about that.
