MBA Jargon Generator

For Product Managers who don't already have an MBA this is a fun site. Just click on the button and it'll give you a three word phrase.

Product Management Productivity Tip #2: Master Email

As a Product Manager you can't afford to waste time.

Email sucks up your time for a number of reasons. You may read the same email multiple times. You may be tempted to respond immediately to messages as they come in. You may allow emails to get you off track from doing what is most important. Not to mention the fact that having an overwhelming amount of email is just plain stressful.

I get about 100 valid (non-spam) emails a day. Over the years I've read several books on how to manage email and have come up with a system that works pretty well. Here are the highlights:

• Only check email three times a day. When you first arrive. Right after lunch and right before you leave.
  
• Turn off outlook notifications - they just tempt you to be distracted.
  
• Process email rapidly and empty your mail box. Try to process it as quickly as you can. For each email immediately decide to delete it, write a quick and short response (if it will take less than a minute), file it to read later or, if it will require a lengthy response, turn it into a task (drag it down to the bottom left corner of Outlook, drop it on the task menu and choose to save it as a task with an attachment.)
  
• Send short responses quickly. Don't spend a lot of time writing and rewriting your responses.
  
• Use keyboard shortcuts. In Outlook Alt s saves and sends your email, F9 sends and receives for all accounts and Ctrl1 gets you to email, Ctrl2 to calendar, Ctrl3 to contacts.
  
• Avoid jumping in on long threads - oftentimes they work themselves out within a few responses. Let other people chime in - wait and see if they can resolve the issues. If the thread continues wait and read all responses at once. You'd be surprised how many times things just work themselves out if you just resist the urge to instantly jump in.
  
• Turn long responses into tasks. If an email response needs a long time and lots of thought to write turn it into one of your high priority "A" items for the day (see previous article on prioritizing).
  
• Save all email that you want to read but doesn't require a response for later. Read it once a week when you are out of energy or not motivated to do other work (Friday afternoon is a great time to do this).
  
• Clean out your email each night and before you leave for the weekend. This is another great thing to do on Friday afternoon. You will be amazed at what a relief it is to start your evening or weekend without the burden of email hanging over your head, and it will make starting the next morning much more pleasant.

I've found that by using these ideas I can usually keep the time I spend on email down to less than thirty minutes a day.

Product Management Productivity Tip #1: Prioritizing

As a Product Manager you will always have far more work to get done than you can possibly get to. Between thinking strategically and driving things related to your products from a high level to executing the day-to-day tactical work required for product success, you will have a full list of to-do items and plenty of requests that go unfulfilled. Ivan Chalif has an interesting post related to this and life balance in his blog, the Productologist.

The ironic things is that the more competent you are, the more people will ask for your time and help. If you become known as the person who can do the absolute best demo and answer customer questions extremely well, your sales people will constantly ask you to come along on customer visits. If you are responsive to customer problems your technical support team will come to you more often to ask for creative solutions. And if you are good at influencing cross-functional teams you'll be asked to step up to the bar and lead efforts that go beyond just making your product successful.

So how do you deal with all of this?

I've used the Franklin system for prioritizing for the past ten years (even though I haven't owned a Franklin planner since Palm Pilots and then SmartPhones came out). I took Franklin's full day course and it was extremely helpful. The goal of their training is not only to help you be more productive, but also to DRAMATICALLY reduce your stress level.

Their system is simple. Every morning before you begin work take your to do list and capture everything you can think of. Then prioritize each task as A, B or C.

A = MUST do today

B = Would like to do today

C = Not important today

Ideally you want to have about 5 items on your A list and 8-10 on your B list maximum. From there you assign all the A's and B's priority numbers.

Then you just work your list straight down, beginning with A1. Having put just a few minutes of thought into it you can be assured you are working on the most important items. If you feel like priorities are shifting you can take a second 10 minute break later that day to reassess, but either way you don't need to feel guilty or anxious about not working on what's important.

There are several other benefits to this approach:

- At the end of the day you can look back and judge whether you accomplished the A list items. This is a great way to assess whether you are staying on track.

- If your boss insists on putting something on your to do list for that day (what Product Manager's boss doesn't) you can show him/her what your estimation of priorities are. If you both agree it is more important then something else can drop off the A list.

- You can capture virtually anything on the list as a C so you never have to worry about forgetting good ideas.

There are several other organization methods I use - I'll cover these in future posts.

Worlds First I.T. Guy - Very Humorous

I wonder if anyone created a persona for this user. :-)