How Mindfulness Can Reduce Burnout For Product Managers
Practicing mindfulness and prioritizing growth may seem like a far-fetched idea for product managers but experience has shown me that great habits cultivated very early in one’s career can help generate momentum and provide a strong sense of stability as you grow older in your career and handle more responsibilities. I recently joined a new company as a PM where I lead the design and management of digital products for our clients. On a daily basis, my to-do list gets so long pretty quickly and this can truly get overwhelming.
The speed at which projects need to be delivered, multiple meetings over the course of the day, product research, and managing a technical team to create great products that meet requirements are always at the top of my mind. For a while, this busy-ness during the day caused me to slip up in my practice of mindfulness and meditation and in turn affected my ability to prioritize my own growth as a person and a product manager. But I recently took out some time for self-evaluations and this is a process that I encourage every product manager to practice at least once per week if they desire to manage stress better and increase their productivity at work.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the attitude of examining your thoughts per time with the intention to understand what is truly real to you versus what is just happening around your environment. According to Greater Good Magazine, Mindfulness entails acceptance, meaning that when we examine our thoughts and feelings, we don’t necessarily do it to judge ourselves with a definition of what is right or wrong. It just means recognizing that at this time, we feel overwhelmed or feel upset that a task is falling behind schedule or that a feature did not quite gain the acceptance that we anticipated. Mindfulness is not practiced with the aim to judge or castigate so always come to your mindfulness meetings with an open mind.
How to Practice Mindfulness
- Meditation — One of the biggest ways of growing mindfulness during our day is to set aside time for Meditation. Meditation can make several positive impacts on our lives which includes:
- A sense of peace because at the place of meditation we can free ourselves from anxiety and the days’ frustrations helping us focus on the present and on our breathing.
- Meditation has been known to foster a general sense of well-being over time. You can begin with 20 minutes of meditation per day at work and increase this time eventually.
- Meditation also helps us to be more attuned to our internal standards of correctness empowering us to make better decisions at the workplace.
2. Journal Your Awareness — During your day, take out time to process your thoughts through writing and also write down your inner states or feelings. Journaling gives you the chance to work your way through the problem using the ‘What and Why’ methods. What are my feelings? Why am I feeling this way? Why ….etc. Once you have sorted through your feelings, you gain more confidence to work them out.
3. Ask for Feedback — Feedback is a great way to gain a different perspective on an issue. A lot of people tend to shy away from putting themselves or their ideas out there to be critiqued. Feedback can be a good way to grow and become better at what you do especially when it comes from people you trust and who truly care about who you are becoming.
Even though the practice of mindfulness may be new to you, it can be the differentiator between a Product Manager and an outstanding Product Manager so get empowered to work more creatively and productively by practicing these concepts.
