Transcripts
1. Productivity Hacks for Product Managers: H. Hello, everyone. I'm Kamal. I'm a product manager
based out of the UK. And in this course,
we're going to look at productivity hacks
for product managers. Almost everybody
I know struggled with this idea of
being productive. In this digital age, there's
so much to distract us, Instagram, Facebook, WSAP
Netflix, you name it. And the challenges
are more so for product managers
because the nature of job is such that you have to invariably engage with so
many different stakeholders, starting from your
leadership team, sales, marketing,
developers, designers. So there's so much to do,
and yet very little time. How then can you
be productive and take your product
to the next level. I myself is struggling
with this idea, and over the ears I've read a
lot of books like a habits, followed a lot of
productivity in urns and devised a system that I think
really works well for me. So in this course, we're
going to look at some of the productivity tips techniques and processes that have
really worked well for me. And towards the end of
this course, hopefully, you'll be able to understand why I do things a certain way and hopefully be able to customize it in a way that
really works well for you. I'm really excited to
bring this course to you and looking forward
to see you on the class.
2. Course Structure: A Hi, everyone, and thanks
for taking this course. Before we get into the details, I want to give you
a quick overview of how this course
is structured. I have structured this course
in two different sections. In the first section,
we'll be talking about the principles
of productivity. In the second section, I'll
be talking about the tools, techniques and processes
that have actually worked for me in getting
me to become productive. The reason I've
structured it this way is because your everyday is going to be very
different from mine. The the personal scenarios, the tools that you
use in your life are going to be vastly
different from mine. Therefore, it is very
important for you to understand why I do things a certain way in order for you
to understand them and apply them as part of
your everyday life to become truly productive. Back when I was struggling
with productivity and was looking at ways of
improving my productivity. I looked at some of the
popular productivity in alerts like Alibdal
Thomas Frank, in YouTube. I also studied books like atomic habits to help understand
some of the principles. After reading about it
for quite a while and also listening to people who
have already done things, I've distilled some of the key ideas into four
principles that I think are very important for anybody in product management trying
to become productive. Let's look at the first
principle in the next lecture.
3. The Fallacy of Multitasking: Hi, everybody, and
in this class, we're going to look at the first principle
of productivity, which I call the fallacy
of multitasking. A lot of us think we are good at multitasking, but we're not. Our brain is simply not
wired to multitask. Imagine a scenario where
you come to office one day and then you find a bunch of tasks vying
for your attention. You could have designers waiting for review commons in
their vision designs. You could also have a bunch of e mails needing your response. There could be that backlog that you always
want to groom and also think about Slack having multiple messages
from different people asking, question or the other. It could be developers asking questions about
functionality or could be testers asking about
functionality related questions, or it could be your
leadership team asking for that roadmap that you have been working for quite a while. As a product manager, you'd obviously know that
at any point in time, there are lots of people
ying for your attention. And if you thought
that, you know, you could manage it
by multitasking. For example, you know,
you could respond to that developer question
and then try to respond to the e mail and then go and
relieve a comment in envision while also trying to groom that backlog, it simply
isn't going to work. Because every time you start
working on a specific task, your brain needs to
understand the context and try to focus on that
work and get it done. Now when you move to
a different task, it needs to understand the new context and
start focusing on it. Now, before you
complete this task, if the first task again
needs your attention, your brain has to leave all
of the understanding that it did now and start
all over again. Frankly, it is the least efficient way of
getting things done. Instead, if you allocated 15 minutes of dedicated focus time for each
of these tasks, you might actually get things
done a lot more faster. If you don't believe me,
let's take a quick example. Take two sheets of paper. In the first sheet, I am good at multitasking
in the first line, and in the second line, right, one, two, ten sequentially. Now, time this activity. In the second sheet, write the first three words of
IMG and multitasking, followed by the
first three numbers, and then write the
next three words, followed by the next
three numbers and continue like that until you
complete all of the words. Tim this activity as well. If you're like the
average person, you'd find that option A was a lot more faster than option B. That brings us the end of the first principle
of productivity, which is multitasking is
bad. So let's not do it.
4. Parkinson's Law: Hi, everybody, and welcome to this next principle
of productivity, which is called the
Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law states
that work expands to fill the time allocated
by you to do it. This was coined by a guy called Parkinson back in
the day in England. He was a British
historian and an author, and while he was observing
bureaucrats working on stuff, he found that whatever time the Bureaucrats allocated
to specific job, it invariably took as
much amount of time. For example, if they
said they would complete a specific
job in 2 hours, they would take 2
hours to complete it. And if they said
they're going to take 3 hours for the same
task to be done, they would end up
taking 3 hours. That is because based
on the time allocated, we would invariably end up procrastinating or reducing
the focus on the work, and we somehow try to get that work done
in the same time. You might have felt it yourself. Let's say you had
just one job to do, which was to study
for that examination. And if that exam was like
say, three days away. And if you said,
I'm going to take all these three days to
study x number of chapters, you might find that
invariably you'd take all of the three days because
you would spend the first two days
procrastinating, trying to binge ward
stuff and trying to be a lot more
less productive in the first two days and
then trying to cram all of that in the
last day anyway. Now, if you instead said, you're going to have only
one day to finish it, you're going to take one day only to prepare for that exam. That's what Parkinson's
law states as a product manager or anybody at all who wants to improve
their productivity, it is important to
understand this concept. And when I learned this concept
it was frankly revealing. So if I had to prepare a roadmap for
presenting to someone, and if I said, you know, I'm setting a deadline for
this roadmap 1 hour before, it has to be delivered, I take that much long time
to actually get it done. I do some part of it now,
some part of it tomorrow, some part of it day
after, and invariably, it's going to take as long as I actually thought it would. But if instead, if I had an artificial
deadline of saying, I'm going to allocate it 2 hours and I'm going to only take
2 hours to complete this, then I'm going to get
it done in 2 hours. With this concept in mind, how do you then apply it
in your everyday life? The first technique is to give an artificial deadline
for all of your tasks. If you know something
is important and if you have to do it, give it an artificial deadline, which is very realistic based on how long you think it's
actually going to take. So if you think a
presentation is preparing a presentation is
going to take only 2 hours, you give 2 hours as a deadline. Don't give more
than it needs to. But some of your brains
might be a lot more smarter, and you might think
that subconsciously, I know this is an
artificial deadline, so I might invariably end
up procrastinating anyway. In that case, I'd say, enter
into a social contract. Tell someone who might even
be remotely interested in that roadmap that
you're going to deliver this roadmap
by x days from man. That would give you some kind of accountability and ensure that you are forced to
complete it by then. You need to always keep this
principle in your mind. Whenever you're going
to estimate work, whenever you're going to
allocate time for work, think about Parkinson's law. That's going to
help you allocate only the amount of time
that you need to focus on. The other tip that
I want to give here is that don't
aim for perfection. You don't have to aim for perfection in all
of what you do. Perfection is also
myth you don't need to work until it's
absolutely perfect.
5. Pareto's Principle: That brings us to the next
principle of productivity, which is the Perdos principle. So back in the day in Italy, a guy called Perdo
found that 80% of the land was owned
by 20% of the people. So this generally
applied universally, no matter what you looked at. For example, 80% of your
marks could come from 20% of your cellabus or 80% of your company's revenue
could come from 20% of your products
or services. The underlying principle
is that 80% of the outcomes are determined
by 20% of the causes. So If you apply this
to productivity, the way you need to look
at it is that you may have 100 task spending
for your attention, but only 20% of the task is actually going
to be truly meaningful and deliver that 80% of value to yourself and
to your business. How do you define productivity, Productivity doing all of the things that you
ever wanted to? Or is it about driving
maximum happiness, or is it about getting
the satisfaction of delivering maximum value in that short amount of
time that you have. In my book, productivity
is about delivering maximum value within the
time that you actually have. Value could be in
terms of business, could be in terms of happiness, could be in terms
of personal life. Anyway, you look at it, it's always about delivering
maximum value. It's not about getting
all 100 of them down. Perdos principle should
always be in the back of your mind when you want to prioritize a task
that you want to do. How do you then identify
that 20% from that 100%? Well, the four D's principle that we're going to talk about next is going to
help you do that.
6. 4 D's Principle: Hi, everybody, and welcome to this next principle
of productivity, which I call the
four Ds principle. The four D stands
for Tit Delegated. Defer it, delete it. Think about it this
way. If you have ten meetings in your calendar. Generally, meetings
are going to be exhausting and you need
to really be only in a meeting if there's going
to be value for you from the meeting or to the
stakeholders by your presence. Take each meeting and
ask these questions. Is this meeting absolutely
necessary for you? If it's not delete it. If it is important, are
you the only person who can actually deliver value by being part
of that meeting? If not, delegate it. Find someone who can equally contribute to that meeting
and assign it to them. If it's only you who can do it, then ask this question. Is this something that
you can do only now? If not, defer it. If yes, do it. This need not just be
applied for meetings. You can apply to any task. Whatever task you look at it, ask these questions to identify task that you can do it and
that you have to do now. This way, even though
you may have 100 tasks, it will help you identify
those specific set of tasks that really need your attention that really provide
value to you. Thank you for listening and hope to see you on
the next class.
7. Time Management Challenges for PMs: All right, then, let's talk
a little bit about the time management challenges product
managers usually face. I appreciate the fact that your every day is going to be very different
from my every day. The products that we manage
are quite different. The stakeholders that we manage are going to
be very different. And depending on the life
cycle the product is in, the kind of activities some
of you may be involved in will be very
different from what I'm currently involved in. However, let's look at
the general picture. For a typical product manager, you usually going to have the following stakeholders
that I'm going to discuss. You'd be having
the business team, the leadership, who are
sponsoring your product, and who would want visibility on the roadmap of the product and and discussions around
how the market looks, how the competition looks,
and so on and so forth. Therefore, you'll have
to engage with them on an ongoing basis to sufficiently keep them
a price to the product, as well as to get
the funding that you'd really need for
your products growth. And then you might have the
sales and marketing team who are looking at the market
and trying to understand from you better so that they can position the
market better and keep you informed of
upcoming customers and new features that they
want from the product. It's important for
you to discuss with them as well on
an ongoing basis. You might also have customers, and as a product manager, it is important for
you to empathize with your customers and understand
their pain points better. You might be involved
in user research, market research,
customer interviews, depending on the size
of the customers and their share in
the products growth, you might actually
be involved in more actively engaging
with them as well. That's on the strategy and
business side of things. And there's also the other
part where you have to execute your products vision
that is build the product and launch
it in the right way. And therefore, you'll be
involved in discussions with the user experience
designers so that you can build the right user
experience for your users, and then you're going to have to build the product the right way. Therefore, you'll engage
with your development team and then you also have to interact with your quality assurance team so that they understand
the requirements, the functionality better,
and so that they can ensure that the product is functioning the way
it's supposed to. If there are critical bugs, you'll always be going
to be prioritizing them amongst the other
bugs that are in the bug. At any point in
time, you're going to be interacting with a lot of different stakeholders and
because of the nature of the product and because of the nature of your
relationship with them, these are not going to
be one time activities. You'll invariably end up interacting with them
on an ongoing basis, and These communications would come from different channels, for example, some of them
may come through Slack, some of them may come
through direct e mails. Some of them may come
through Zoom meetings, or you could also have vision
comments or Jira comments. So there are different
channels that demand your attention as well. So at any point in time, there are a number of activities that are wine for
your attention, and if you're not
organized well, it might be very
difficult for you to keep up and you
might find that you're either not enjoying
your job enough or you might find that your productivity is not as high as you should be. Amongst all these stakeholders, you're also
stakeholder yourself. You need that meantime
so that you can focus on things that you really want to do. For the product. It could be either
grooming and backlog. It could be looking at the
market and coming with new hypotheses for you to test out in the market
and so on and so forth. Therefore, You're also stakeholder that you
shouldn't be ignoring. So time management
is a common problem. There are a lot of
product managers face. So in the coming classes,
we're going to look at some of the ways
I have used for managing my time efficiently and bringing some sense of
sanity in my everyday life. So hopefully that
gives a good overview of the time management
challenges. And if you're a product manager you might very well
relate to this, and if you're someone
who's aspiring to a product manager might give a good insight of what life after becoming a product
manager might well be. So thank you for listening and hope to see you
on the next class.
8. My Productivity Setup: A We already talked about the different
time management challenges the product
manager faces. So in a day, there
are going to be a multiple tasks that are
lying for your attention, and yet there's only so
much you can do in a day. How then can you be as
productive as possible. So let's now talk about the productivity system
that I actually use. The first thing is I use tools to help me do things in
a more organized way. And a lot of you might be
doing it already as well. So there's nothing new here. But how we actually led the
tools talk to each other and how you actually utilize the tool effectively
is what we look at. There are broadly
two things that are product manager
is involved in. One is the strategy and
business level initiatives, and the other thing is
about the execution where you build test
and delivery product. Now, when it comes to the strategy and
business side of things, where I have to do
competitive analysis, market analysis, and
prepare a roadmap, I use a tool called ha. A lot of you might be using different tools to
already do that. Aha also provides me a nice
way of managing ideas. Ideas are going to come from
multiple different sources. You're going to have
ideas come from your pre sales team,
your marketing team, your designers, developers,
your customers, your competitive research,
our market analysis. Aha also allows me to
create an idea portal. All of these ideas
get into a ha there. I can manage my ideas as well
and at a strategy level. Next, when it comes to
execution, I use Jira. A lot of you might
already be using a similar kind of software
to achieve the purpose. So for example, when an idea needs to be further worked on, for say user research or user testing or user
experience design. I use Jira for assigning to user experience designers and managing them for and
tracking it there. And when an idea is good
enough to become a user story, I then move it to the
development board where I groom it and build
my backlog so that I can assign it to my
development team as part of sprints and testers can
raise defects in Jira, and I can try all of them there. And thirdly, when it
comes to communication, I use something called Slack. And a lot of you might
already be using Slack or teams any instrument
communication tool like that. Of course, there are
other tools like say, e mails and documents
and so on and so forth, but they are very common and so I'm not getting
into the details of it. So the broad level, these are the three different sections
where I use specific tools. And you might be using
these already as well. However, I want to talk
about two other tools that a lot of us miss
as product managers. One is a note taking system. I use notion to
help me efficiently take notes and use it
as my second brain. The other one is a personal
task management system. And I use a tool called choir, and you could use choir or to do it or any of the task
management system, which actually works for you. In one of the coming lectures, I'm going to talk about
why I think you need to have a note second brain notion, and why you need to have a personal task
management mechanism. And we'll also talk about how each of these
systems talk to each other and reduce the need for your brain to hold
a lot of information, dump them on each of
these different systems, and only use them as you need. So that's what we're going to look at in the coming lectures. This is how my
personal setup looks, think about how your setup looks and if you're missing any
of these missing parts, and I think you really should consider bringing
a tool for that. Thank you for listening and
let's see in the next class.
9. Why Integrate: All right, then. Now
that I have talked about some of the tools that product managers
commonly use, and also now that
I have introduced two additional tools that I think you should
have in your Kitty. Let's look at how to
effectively utilize the tools. Okay, the way we'll look at the coming lectures is on
how to organize better, how to record information
better, how to plan better, how to execute better
so that you can bring some kind of
sanity to your already. Busy life. So in this class, we're going to look at how
to organize stuff better. So we saw already the
different tools that we use, and depending on your
existing tool set up. And if you had to introduce
a task management system, as well as a second ring
system like motion, it means a number of tools
is going to be quite high. And if you're lucky,
you might find one tool that does
multiple of the features, and your number of tools
might actually reduce. But let's address the
elephant in the room. Why do we need so many tools. As product manager,
you'd know that. No products are created to
solve specific user needs. There are specific pain points that product managers
like us suffer, and therefore, these tools help address some of
these pain points. Some of these tools
are inevitable. They just help us
do our jobs better. We need a tool to help
us roadmap better. We need a tool to
help manage ideas. We need a tool to help
execute those ideas. We need a tool to communicate
with our stakeholders. Therefore, tools are inevitable. How we manage these tools
and utilize them to their best possible potential
is what makes a difference. Okay. So that's about importance of tools in
organizing our life. But then, with so many tools,
there are other challenges, how do we manage the information
that tool effectively? So an easy point
that a lot of us overlook is integration
between the tools. If the tools can talk with
each other effectively, then it means a lot of our
work is automated and things can an autopilot model.
Let's take a step back. Let's assume that there is no integration
between these tools, and what would happen? If I had an idea in our A that was good enough
now for execution, I have to create that
epic and story in Jira. And if every time the status of the epic and story changes, I'll have to manually go
and update them in ha so that the roadmap and feature
pipeline is kind of updated. But ha and Jira have two way integration available,
and I have set it up. Therefore, whenever
an idea is good enough for me to push into Jira, I can simply push
that into Jira. And because they're
always synchronized, there is so much less rework
for me to actually do. And Jira is where developers and designers and testers
do a lot of their work. And every time the status
of the task changes, every time there is
an additional comment in for a specific task
and discussion happens, I have to log into Jira
and understand them. And also, look at communication channels like Slack
at any point, there's going to be a ton of messages waiting for attention. So I have to focus on
two different tools now to effectively address queries. But what if there was
integration between Jira, Slack, which exists. And because of that, once the planning is done and once
people start working on it, I just have to be
focused on Slack alone, because every time there's
a developer question, either they ping me directly in Slack or if there is
a common in Jira, I get notified in Slack. Every time a status of
a task changes in Jira, I get notified in Slack
and therefore Slack would act as a central
point of communication. Throughout the day where I can ensure that is
seamless execution. The other thing about instant
communication tools like Slack is that if you're going
to be responding to chats, you might quickly be thinking about stuff and
trying to respond to a lot of things and your actual work
might get affected. And therefore, it is
important to have a synchronous communication.
What do I mean by that? If you look at a
conversation in Slack, if you don't know
the answer to it, you don't have to
immediately work towards getting that answer and
responding to them. You might want to respond at a time that's more
favorable to you. So that's what it means by a
synchronous communication. You don't have to be in
sync with the other person. You can take time to respond
at your own comfort. But Problem with this is there could be a number of chats
that could need your response. You might tend to forget them if you don't respond
to them immediately. Slack has some features about
notification and stuff, but they're not as helpful
as I thought they would be. So instead, what I use
is a to do is task. Whenever an activity
needs my attention, I added to a to do is
task for later when I can look at it and respond to it in a time more
favorable to me. But the problem is,
Do I create all of the communications
that I haven't slack manually in
a to do is app? That's a lot of rework
that I don't want to do. That's where integration
again comes into plture Because Slack
integrates well with to do apps to do or qui and can easily create
a task from Slack. That's another power
of integration. Because Slack is also
integrated in my calendar, I also get notified
about upcoming meetings. If you can set up an integration between your to do app
and your calendar, whatever task
schedule to be done, will also get reflected
in your calendar and therefore to slack The outset, this might sound like a lot of effort to actually get things
to talk to each other. But if you remember,
all of these are one time setups,
and if you do that, all of them can talk
to each other and you can work out ways on how to effectively utilize
them because you're minimizing that much
more of rework. I can hear you. What
if you had a tool that didn't offer this much
integration out of the box. Then you can use
services like Zapier or automate IO which offer integration between
different tools. So it's all about creativity
and how best you can minimize rework and get things organized amongst all
the tools that you have. I highly recommend that you go ahead and start integrating stuff because
that's a first step to organizing your life better.
10. Why we need a Task Management App: Okay, then we're
going to continue looking at organizing recording, planning, and executing work. In the last class,
we've talked about how the different tools help
us organize better, and we talked about the
importance of using integration to help manage
your time efficiency. In this class, we're going to
talk about a specific tool that a lot of product
managers don't use, but really should
consider using, which is a personal
task management system. Long back, I read
about a book called Getting things done
by David Allen. In that book, he talks about how our brain is meant to have
ideas and not hold them. And it is a very
important concept which we need to understand
because why task the brain in storing
information that can be best transferred to a b that is really
meant to do it. And really free your brain to focus on execution
product managers. We actually don't struggle in
getting the big stuff done. There's stuff about
planning a roadmap or doing a backhol
grooming or getting ready for that
customer interview because all of these
are already booked in your calendar because
it's either you have a sprint planning meeting
coming up or you might have roadmap presentation
coming up with your leadership or you have a customer interview schedule. So because they are already
documented in the calendar, you already have things
planned well ahead, and you actually get those done. What we actually lack
and what we struggle with when we talk about
productivity is that meantime, the things where we are
actually the stakeholder, where we want to do some
focused product work like researching about a
competitors product or responding to the developer question that's
been pending from the morning or reviewing a design that's
pending your review. That's where we actually
struggle with because that's not documented anywhere?
That's not in our calendar. And many times what happens is either we forget about that, or we remember it just before the due date that we do a really hurried
halfzar job at it. And that's where I
think it is important for us to have to do is app or a task management app where we can record
and some information. Think of the scenario
in this remote world where a lot of conversation
happens through instant messaging
platforms like Slack. And because you're
always available, the communication is synchronized
with that other person. If you can respond quickly,
it actually works ones. But what if there
is a question from your developer, where
you had to go back, do some research or work on it, and then come back
and respond to him. In that case, because
it is instant, you're under pressure of
responding to them immediately. So you might invariably drop whatever you're
already doing and then try to get the information that the developer or test or design needs, and
then respond to it. This means that you're invariably end up
doing multitasking, which if you remember is something that we
won't to avoid. So we want to get
into the habit of doing a synchronous work where our existing work is
no longer affected by some other information that needs our attention immediately. So whenever I look at a slack communication that
needs some work from me, I add it as a to do task in
either choir or to do list. And that way, I always know that even though I don't have to immediately respond to it, because it's
documented somewhere, I will not forget about it. And I can always continue doing my current work and then
come back to focusing on it. Remember the other principles
that we talked about. We talked about
Parkinson's law and Pertos principle
and the four Ds. Parkinson's law states
that you need to allocate the work only as
much of time it needs. I can add a due date as
well as a time for it. And if I can have it integrated with my calendar,
like I have done, I'll always know that if it clashes with any
of our existing work, And therefore, I'll be
able to plan my work well, and I will just be
really focused on giving that only as much
of time it actually needs. And I I keep adding tasks to it, like I have here,
we always tend to underestimate the number of
tasks that we have to do it. And we always tend
to overestimate our ability to get
those tasks done. When it is in a to do
list app like this, you'll actually figure
out that there are a lot more tasks than you can actually manage to complete. And therefore, you're forced to follow the Ferredo
principle and the four D principle and do only the tasks that really
need your attention in a day. So it is important
for you to get into the habit of adding
stuff to do list app. And the way I have is I have a personal workspace as well
as a professional workspace. I have found that the
task management system is really important in your
personal workspace as well. For example, if I had to remember to take out
the bed every friday, I have a recruiting
task set up there. That way, I don't have
to remember about it, and I don't have
to force myself to remembering about
such simple things, but very important
things nonetheless. And because they're integrated
into my smart voice, you always get notified about adjust in time
to get that doe. So I think all of you should really focus on
getting to do app. In your productivity system
as soon as possible and
11. Why you need a second brain Notion: In this cloud, we're going
to talk about why you need a second brain to actually
be more productive. When I talk about second brain, I talk about software
like notion or even confluence that can have as an information
dump for yourself. You know, this goes back to what I stated in the
previous session, which is your brain is for having ideas,
not holding them. So and as product manager, you constantly having ideas
come from multiple sources. Many times, these are
already well documented. For example, they are
documented either in an e mail, or they documented in user research sessions
and so on and so forth. What about sessions
that you actually run? If you're part of
from the meeting, are you supposed to remember
all of that information? What if you wanted to retrieve information from the meeting? The way I do it is I use notion by capturing the notes
in an organized fashion. And if you're
familiar with notion, you'd know that notion has
a ton of features that help you organize stuff in
a more structured way. For example, this is how my personal note taking
system looks like. So whenever there's a meeting, I create a new meeting, I record the information
with the relevant tags. And this is like a quick
note taking system. They don't have to
be comprehensive. They just have to have enough information
for you to understand at a later point
with relevant tags. That way, if I had to
retrieve information, I can quickly retrieve it
from notion by using one of the search functions or
one of the table views, and notion has powerful
table views, and therefore, you have to use them to retrieve information and tag
information accordingly. Very well use
conference as well or you can use Google Docs
or any other thing. But what I worked well for me is the way or the
features that notion office and the best
part is free for your own personal
use. Sprint planning. You can set up what
all checklists I need to cover before actually
doing that sprint plan. Likewise, you can
create a number of templates well ahead
of time for tasks that actually repeat that way
you're going to get work done a lot more faster and a lot
more more organized way. So I'd highly recommend
using notion. Or conference, create
templates well ahead of time for work
that's repetitive, that involves a bunch of steps. That way you will always
get stuff done faster. That way you will always get stuff done in a
more organized way. Maybe not all of you need this, but some of you may
actually be benefited by giving some kind of organization into how we actually
take your notes. As long as you have things
documented somewhere, there'll always be some kind of background processing on it. Remember, the scenarios where
you think about something, sleep over it, and then
you get the Aha moment. It's always important to
document things somewhere, ideas, meetings, notes, anything
12. Start with the Calendar: Hi, everybody. And we're nearly coming towards
the end of the class. And now we're going to talk
about the importance of lend. Remember the principles of Parkinson's law that
we talked about. To reiterate
Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill
the time allocated to it. So your calendar already
is going to have meetings that are either
set up by you or by others. If you have to do app and you're integrated
with your calendar, you're going to have tasks
reflecting on your calendar. And I recommend
ending every week by having a view of your
calendar for the next week. That way you have a
very good picture, bird's eye view of
what's upcoming. And you can plan stuff ahead. And if you think your
calendar is too busy, that forces you to
reorganize your calendar or your task in a way that you are better
able to manage stuff. And you're forced to follow the four D's principle
by delegating it, deleting it, or deferring
it or doing it. And the other thing is start every day with
a calendar as well, because priorities
change all the time. And if you start every day of
your life with a calendar, because as new tasks come in, can plan work better. A thing that I
highly recommend is block chunks of time for
focused work because I use outlook Microsoft's inval feature where it allows me to book pre planned focus time based on my calendar
automatically. That way, I always
have time where by allocating time to
engage with other people. I also have time where
I can do focused work. A lot of us tend to
overestimate the actual time that's actually available for
us to do because in a day, you only want to spend as much time as you think
you should for work. And it's important for you
to have a good understanding of how much of time you
don't want burnout. If your calendar is
chalk box full of work, you know that it's not
a well planned day, and you need to reorganize. End your week with a calendar, start every day with a calendar. It's going to do remarkable
work in getting your self organized planning better and executing stuff better.
Thank you for listening.
13. Pomodoro Technique: Early on in my career, as I was just about
starting to work, one of the senior leaders
in our organization set up a session to discuss about
the Pomodoro technique. He had four tomatoes
up on this slide. And I was never
really excited about that session back
then because I didn't appreciate the need
for managing a time efficiently because my life
was not as busy as it is now. Watching Netflix on free time didn't really need much
of planning, did it. However, now that I'm
a product manager, and I see how busy my life is, I wish I had paid a lot
more attention back then. Hankfully the Pomodoro technique is a time tested
classic technique. This was conceptualized
by a guy called Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s. What this technique
essentially is, you divide your time
into 25 minute blocks of time and do
focused work in that. Because if you had
to continuously focus on 2 hours for work, you're frankly not
going to do it because there are so many
things distracting you. You could have a slack message,
you could have Facebook, whatsapp or you want to read that exciting
new article that you just so there's so many ways you can
actually get distracted. By blocking them into
smaller chunks of time, you can actually get a lot
more focused work done. So one pomodoro consists
of, four tomatoes, which is one tomato
is 25 minutes of focused work and 5
minutes of relaxation. You do focused work
for 25 minutes. Take five minute
break where you can do anything, take
a glass of water, try to try to check your
Facebook and so on. Then you start your
next pomadoro where you again do another 25
minutes of focused work. Likewise, you do
four pomadoros after four pomadoros
you're free to take half an hour's break where
you can do anything at all. Imagine a real life scenario. You started your first
pomadoro midway, 13 minutes in you're
tempted to check your what But you also know
that only 12 minute of the pomadoro
is actually left. So you're actually likely to
complete the 12 minute force yourself into completing
that 12 minute because you know that five
minute break is upcoming. So this way, you're
less likely to get distracted and more likely to
get more focused work done. And as product managers, we tend to get distracted a lot. By non work related
factors necessarily, but purely work related
factors purely because we are needed by so many people and there's so much to work on. This idea of blocking focus time in your
calendars and then using pomadoro techniques
to get that work done could really be the pill
that you've really needed. And there are tools
that actually help us to follow this
pomadoro technique. I use an app called forest. It's a gamify app where each pomadoro at the end of each pomadoro you
actually plant a tree, and your goal is
to grow a forest. There are tons of free apps available that help you follow
this pomadoro technique, and I highly
recommend trying one of these techniques as your assignment and see
how that goes. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in
the next class.
14. The Power of Habits: So this is going to
be the last class, and I'm going to talk
about the power of habits. So I read this book called
Atomic Habits by James Clear. And that book talks about the importance of forming
habits in a consistent manner. What is the use of having all these fancy apps like notion or to do if you don't use
them in a consistent manner. You need to get into
the habit of using them on a consistent basis and all these tiny changes that
you make over a period of time compound into something more meaningful and significant. We know that money compounds
over time, and therefore, these small tiny habits, tiny changes to your life
will also compound over time. You don't have to
make drastic changes to your life immediately. All you need to do
is try to get into the habit of looking at your calendar the end of every week. Try to get into the habit of adding a task to your
task management system. These tiny changes will over a period of time provide
significant improvement. Other thing that you
need to think about is don't fall into the trap
of aiming for perfection. A lot of people quit midway because they
aim for perfection. The aim for perfection
in their final output. Instead of perfection,
aim for progressiveness. You need to
progressively improve. Those are the two
thoughts in this lecture.
15. Class Assignment: Hi, everybody, and thank
you for taking this class. I want to talk about
the class activity. Because this course is for productivity for
product managers, it's not just
important for you to listen to the concepts
discussed in this class. It's important for
you to reflect on it and actively start
applying on it. And therefore, what I would recommend is at the
end of the class, try to reflect on that idea and see how it affects
your day to day life. So what I'd really like to
hear from you is list of the different tools that
you already have in your life that help
organize stuff better. Think about what additional
tools that you can bring into your life to
organize stuff better, have a checkbox to
see how many of these applications can talk against each other
through integration. And then I'd be
really curious to know how the concepts
discussed in this class, and the techniques
discussed in this class helped in your productivity
journey at the end of a week. Or if it didn't, what
didn't work for you? Let's have a chat about it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you on the next class.
16. Closing Thoughts: Hey, everybody, that brings
us to the end of this course. Hopefully, the principles
of productivity that we talked earlier in the
class were of use to you, and also my personal
productivity setup and the different tools and techniques that I discussed
would be of some use to you. So you need to keep in mind that these are only guidelines. These are not absolute rules
that you need to follow. Customize this into whatever
that works for you, right? Because every day is going to be very
different and your tools, techniques, and scenarios are
going to be very different. So try and pick
and choose things that can actually work for you. We also talked about
the power of habits. You do not have to
change overnight. You can slowly start
changing one by one, because as we talked about
the power of habits, compounding effect
of habits is huge. Here's what I want you to go
away from your course with. Use tools, integrate tools, organize well using tools, plan using your calendar, execute using a technique, and ultimately, do whatever
that works for you. And it's a continuous process. As a product manager, I
don't have to tell you. Everything is an
iterative process. You test your hypothesis. If it works, you try to
improve on it, build on it. If it doesn't, you pivot. Thank you for listening
and all the best.
Kamal Kannan, Product Manager
