Shreyas Doshi’s Time management principles
This entry is motivated by the twitter posts of Shreyas Doshi. His tweets aim to capture the challenges of time management as a product manager moves up into new responsibilities inside the organization and has to overlook more tasks and coordinate larger teams.
He starts highlighting the limits to classic approaches such as using #milestones or #priority matrices as work starts to pile up with a near-infinite of lists of things you could be doing.
Then he goes and explains different principles that work for him.
- Instead of brute-fore, you need to take into account scope. As you cover more scope you need to understand that your impact might not be as intense in each task as you used to do.
- Block spaces in your calendar for deep work. This also means to limit meetings, plan at the end of each day the next day, fit the tasks in next’s days calendar (prioritize), plan next week on Friday evening.
- Don’t allocate same effort intensity to every task. There are leverage (L) tasks, neutral (N) tasks, and overhead (O) tasks. Each requires different quality degrees.
So, when you energy is high, go for L tasks, when it is low or you cannot protect your deep work space, go for O tasks.
4. Be careful on falling for “proof of worth”tasks, no need to make every task an object to support your value and contribution.
5. Instead of relying on the Eisenhower Matrix, go for radical delegation:
6. Interestingly, he suggests to embrace placebo productivity so that you free up tasks and get eager for the deep work time. He also suggests that for deep work to change work location.
7. He also suggests that instead of trying to measure your productivity by looking at whether you get something out of your time (ROI), the goal should be to reduce the difference between: value of optimal option — value of chosen option.
8. Keep time for development work / focused study
9. Remember what you value as success in your life, and align towards it.
Hope you found the insights from Shreyas Doshi as interesting as I did.