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Productivity Per Minute
Learn methods for rapid focus and time-boxed productivity
Hi
Welcome to the April edition of my email. Thank you all again for the feedback! Please keep it coming; it helps tailor these emails to your needs.
This month, we’ll discuss skills often overlooked but some of the most important for product managers: the ability to context-switch quickly, focus rapidly, and be productive in time-boxed work sessions.
Last week, I wrote a comprehensive article for startups that want to hire their first product manager. If you are a PM, the article contains interesting information to help you learn what qualities startups are looking for when making early product hires for Head of Product positions. (I’ve provided a snippet and a link below.)
This email will close with a collection of my best finds since the last edition. Thank you for reading—it’s great to have you here!
Productivity per minute
You just got out of a meeting, and now you have 30 minutes to complete a task that requires you to focus. You need to get in the zone and find your flow state. But the moment you sit down, you check notifications on your phone, and follow one of them into a rathole of new information. You’re officially distracted. Twenty minutes go by and nothing is done, and you now have just 10 minutes left until the next meeting. And the next time you have a tight deadline, the cycle begins again.
We know we don’t want our days to be like this. But if we don’t take control, our days quickly look like the image below:
Jumping between meetings, Slack messages, emails, and tasks makes it impossible to give complete focus to anything. We will not be able to think deeply about a problem we are trying to solve. We can never produce our best work. If we let all that jumping around happen throughout our day, we will not be able to get our tasks done, we will not be good listeners, and we will feel overwhelmed. We will also have a hard time making difficult decisions. If we can’t gain control, our performance will suffer. Science calls this attention residue. We can’t fully transition from one task to another in a matter of seconds. The context we just switched from will take up processing power within our brains.
For example, I want to write these monthly emails on weekends. I have a 2-year-old, and I want to spend time with her. So I give myself 2 two-hour windows to write on Saturday and Sunday when she takes her nap. In those four hours, I need to be able to produce a lot of content that I can edit later in the evenings.
I can tell you that I used to be terrible at time blocking like this. If writing a paper in school took me a total of 4 hours, I spent 3 hours struggling to find focus.
As a product manager, switching context between features and teams is daily life.
All the meetings, check-ins, and work sessions make our focus time windows very narrow. To get things done, we have to find ways to focus fast. Luckily, it is a learnable skill. Following is what I do to increase my “productivity per minute.”
To enable ourselves to be productive and focused, we need to work in a way that lets us put all our attention on one task at a time. This requires discipline, which means not opening Slack or glancing at your phone for new notifications. Put your phone on DND, and turn it face down or keep it far away from you if you have to. Disable browser notifications. Turn off Slack notifications. If you deal with multiple web-based distractions, there are apps that can help you lock yourself out of specific sites that you know will distract you.
Lock yourself in an imaginary soundproof room with nothing but the tools you need to do focused work. Bring some water. You will be sitting there for a while.
We need to allow our full attention on one task for an extended period of time, which is known as deep work (introduced in a book by Cal Newport, titled Deep Work). When I listened to the audiobook a few years ago, it made me realize the importance of focused work sessions. And it forced me to rethink how I plan my day.
Our productivity per minute is highest when we reach a flow state. Flow state is a mental state where it takes no effort to focus on the task at hand. Deep work sessions enable us to reach a flow state.
To create space for these work sessions, we need to time-box our days. Strive to schedule work sessions of 60-90 minutes. (If you can go longer, even better.) But don’t be discouraged once you start. It will take time to stay focused for that length of time. But coming out of a productive session like that will give you a feeling of happiness and accomplishment you’ll quickly get addicted to.
As part of this process, you want to learn to observe when you lose focus. What were you doing when it happened? Did you switch contexts? Did you check your phone? Did someone interrupt? Once you observe and take active notice, you can learn how to address interruptions.
Eliminate the habit of passively checking your phone or email inbox for to-dos (in other words, tasks others have for you). Set specific time windows for communication. If you set your Slack status, people will have no expectation of a rapid response. Let them know when you will check Slack. (Slack offers a feature that lets someone override your “do not disturb” setting when something is genuinely urgent. This will give you more peace of mind when turning Slack off.)
I have noticed that once you do this regularly you gain focus quicker and can accelerate the time to enter your flow state. And the faster you can do this, the more you increase your productivity per minute.
Excerpt: How to hire your first product manager
Finding the right product manager is very important for a startup. In an extensive article, I dive into the specifics to help founders learn what to look out for so that they can bring in the best candidate for the role. These insights come from real-world conversations.
I personally have been an early product hire, and I have brought several products from zero to one. I’ve also helped companies and CEOs establish businesses on top of new products.
If you are a product manager looking to get into a startup, the article is a good read to understand what skill set and experience people look for. (And if you know someone who would find this helpful, feel free to forward it to them.)
As a bonus, I included a few behavioral interview questions. These can be valuable no matter what side of the table you are sitting on.
Here is a checklist to help decide when it is a good time for companies to hire the first product manager:
You can read the full article here.
Best finds of the month
As an appendix to today’s main article about productivity per minute is a great read from Paul Graham about the maker vs. manager schedule. He breaks the day apart and says to leave at least half a day for maker work.
Then, block four hours for other productive work. Product managers are not makers by profession. But we do need to produce quality PRDs and work on product discovery, user behavior analysis, and the hypothesis for our next features. We do need time to make.
Tools of Titans - Tim Ferris (paragraph from the book)
I am currently reading this book. Several times, I have been jumping back to chapters and sections in this book. By the way, I am not always annotating like a maniac, but this was so good that I kept underlining.
Nobody prepares us for failure. We are scared of it because we don’t experience it a lot. Being scared makes us cautious. Living a cautious life will hold us back and limit our options. We need to take risks, especially when we are young and independent. And in case we fail, we have lots of time left to repair.
As product managers we will feel uncomfortable before a release. An experienced product veteran once told me: “I want you to feel uncomfortable, that means you are learning.”
I shared Dalio’s “The economic machine” video, last time. Today’s article is very relevant to current markets and his observations here are invaluable. He questions the traditional investment strategy of a stock/bond mix. Not just because of low yields. In this current market environment it skews heavy towards the US Dollar and that doesn’t have to be a good thing. It provides good insights on possible tax changes and capital controls.
Let me know if these less product related links are valuable. I personally think they are good reads but not necessarily if you are focussed on product management content.
That’s it for the month of April.
And if you know someone that might be interested, please forward my email to them.
Thank you for reading and have an amazing weekend!
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