Improving productivity as a Product Manager at home

Key points:

• Plan your days
• Leave room for flexibility
• Give yourself a break!
• Use established techniques and tools
• Stay connected
• Set some clear boundaries

So it looks like we will all be staying home a lot more in the future. Quite a few of us have been more used to this already and there are some great resources to draw from to stay productive. Whilst I’m sure this current situation is temporary, I think more of us will work from home more often in the future.

Here are some broad brush strokes on how to remain productive whilst working from home. This article may be a bit of a laundry list of things that are useful to explore further. I plan to flesh these out in the near future now that this has become a pressing need for many of you.

Make a clear plan to be productive

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail - Benjamin Franklin

Much like most things that we do, it is important to have a clear idea of what you want to do before you attempt to do it. This is a critical attribute of a good product manager.

There are lots of ways to structure and plan your day when working from home. Having a clear agenda helps many people. It really depends on the nature of what you are doing. At times when I am very busy I find that time blocking out my day helps me to achieve what I need to that day. When I am less busy I only schedule the things that I absolutely must stick to a time for (e.g. appointments).

Don’t forget that a product manager should really keep time aside for thinking and being strategic. If you are someone who thrives on being busy for the sake of it, you will need to fight that urge or you will not likely make a great product manager in the long run.

I have found that having a single broader objective for the day helps with focus. Having some supporting smaller objectives also helps. A task list ideally that has no specific dates and a set of projects and areas to review are useful.

The real guidance here is to experiment. Try out different ways to plan your day, keep what works and discard what does not. But don’t forget to run your experiments scientifically and give these tests some time and space to assess their efficacy.

Be prepared to roll with the punches

Whatever plans you make you should be prepared to be flexible with them. The idea behind planning is to ensure that you achieve what is a priority. It is supposed to reduce your stress and take pressure off your conscious memory to let you get on with the business of execution. If you find that you become too militant with your planning you will be stressed when life happens and you miss some deadlines.

Not everything is equal in importance and urgency.

Now more than ever people need to give themselves a bit of a break. Know that if you try to cram too much into your plan for the day you are setting yourself up to fail. Concentrate on few priorities and work through a backlog of change that is also prioritised. Sound familiar?

Leverage the techniques from experts

I talked about importance and urgency. Assessing things through these lenses is critical to remain productive and can be done through the Eisenhower Matrix. In it’s simplest form it is to:

• Do what is both urgent and important,
• Plan for things that are important but not urgent,
• Delegate things that are urgent but not important, and
• Eliminate what is neither urgent, nor important

Another great tip is to use the Pomodoro Technique. I like this one for things that require additional focus. Essentially you set a timer for 25 minutes and exclude all other distractions for this period. You then take a 5 minute break before you can continue. This can be done four times in a row if necessary and you can then take a longer break (say 20 or 30 minutes). For me, I’m most productive when I do two in a row and then change up what I’m doing to something else that requires less focus.

You may be surprised by this one, often times you may be stuck for how to tackle a task. Or you may get writers block on something creative. Knowing that you only have a short period of time in which to achieve something can really help to focus and the results add up.

This is also reflected in Parkinson’s Law. This law states that the work expands to fill the time available for its completion. All this really means is that if you give yourself a long time to do something, you will often take a long time to do it. If you give yourself less time you will complete the task in that time.

I find that Parkinson’s Law combines nicely with the Pareto Principle to make you even more productive. This is the rule that is often known as the 80/20 rule. It states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the effort. Adages such as “perfect is the enemy of the good” are reflective of this observation. In essence, you should seek to complete actions and move onto the next one rather than keep hold of them to polish them into perfection as you will diminish your returns for effort past a certain point.

Use the tools that have been born from experience

Collaboration tools are your friend. A significant amount of experience and research has gone into their development. That doesn’t mean that they are all perfect, or even good. But we are lucky to find ourselves in a time that these things exist and we can access them easily.

Currently I am really liking Notion. It is a solid collaboration system that is extremely flexible. It is also part of the no code movement which favours intuitive and simple user experience over technical knowledge like programming to deliver results. There are a bunch of great templates but I recommend you analysing these and building your own. You can create embedded databases with different views (like a table, kanban or gallery) or just use like a markdown editor. I am currently using Notion to draft this blog and manage my workflow for the process.

Another proponent of this movement is Airtable. This is a powerful tool that is kind of like a combination of databases and excel in a simple online way with lots of integrations. You can use this to crunch data and deliver dashboards or even build on top of it for more complete stand alone products.

Coda is another of the no code movement. An online document based system with a wealth of templates you can leverage. It makes it very easy to get started with a powerful, online document that uses existing wisdom.

Miro is a great visual tool for collaboration. It enables you to all edit the same visual canvas together online. There are a bunch of templates to facilitate outcomes of meetings or produce valuable documents. You can also build your own base to use.

One more tool that I like (and have been using for some time now) is Mind Meister. it is a pretty straight forward, online mind mapping tool. It is great for speed of use and for collaboration. I have used this for a long time and it still meets the brief really well. I often use this when talking to someone so that we can document the discussion on the fly – try it out by updating the map when your colleague is speaking with what they are covering in a summarised way and vice versa. Can be very powerful to drive outcomes post discussions.

Stay connected to stay productive

I’m sure you are all now becoming familiar with the tools to stay connected. Chatting on the phone remains a great option. Chat clients, emails, audio and video tools are here to help you stay connected. Below is a brief list of a few that I know and have used:

Productive chat

• Slack is great for collaborating. It is free for most unless you have some power requirements like SSO and long term history retention. It can replace unnecessary meetings and emails and is more powerful than straight forward chat tools.
• WhatsApp is my preferred tool in the simple chat category. Others exist out there like Messenger which is linked to Facebook, iMessage which is an exclusive Apple service and many more including SMS.

Productive email (and beyond)

Superhuman is one I like the look of but haven’t yet tried out.

Productive video

• Zoom has exploded recently due to the pandemic and is great
• We use GSuite and therefore get access to Google’s Meet for conferencing which works well for us
• Houseparty is an app that is less for business and more for fun but one you should all check out

Productive audio

• Once again, WhatsApp does the trick here for most cases and others above like Slack, Zoom, Google Meet and other chat and video tools support audio only calls or meetings.
• Krisp is an interesting one to check out, it works with other apps to use AI to manage background noise more effectively.

Create physical and mental separation

Research on this topic has found that some people prefer to keep things separate (Segregators) and others prefer to mix their work and personal lives (Integrators). Whilst this might be true, it can be a slippery slope for most integrators that can lead to working around the clock unless you maintain some systems to support the separation.

In his popular book, Atomic Habits, James Clear talks a lot about setting up systems to drive behaviour. If you want to go for a run more often, then put your running shoes near the door. When you see this your mind will associate the view with the drive to go running. This makes it easier to keep up with the habit. All of this translates to working spaces.

If you have a clear boundary, you will not slip between working all hours of the day and procrastinating to the point of making your work suffer. This can happen more easily than you think. If you just put your laptop on your lap and run through work and emails on the couch you may find yourself doing that around the clock before you know it. This will put pressure on you and your relationships and can contribute to burn out.

You should also see what time of day you are most productive. Keep your tasks that require the most focus and energy for those times. Batch up tasks that are similar and complete them together. These tips can leverage your mental state and natural preferences to really help you to maintain focus and drive you to be more productive.

I will likely create some more detailed posts on some of these elements and may add to this later as this will be a focus area for some time.

So stay safe, keep active and productive, and reach out to us if you need help with your business.

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